Original/Movie Era Starfleet Ships Usable Against the Borg?

[Dayton3]

We've seen Excelsior and Miranda class starships engaging the Borg in combat (with various degrees of success and failure).

Can anyone suggest other original Trek series or original movie era designs including serious fan designs that might prove effective against the Borg?

I think the Northampton and Chandley class frigates from the FASA Federation Ship Recognition Manual might do well against the Borg.

Both were heavy with torpedo armament. Known for being very fast and agile. And the Chandley was built to transport armed Marine forces aboard alien ships. So they could theoretically conduct boarding operations against Borg cubes in order to damage them internally.

 

[Plecostomus]

Well, I really think it would come down to weather or not YOU want them to be effective/ineffective against the Borg. Short of creating enormous tables of standardized data and setting up a massive realtime wargame-sim I really don't know how we would go about quantifying this.

 

[kv1at3485]

Meh, just turn them into giant missiles. I mean, a bunch of hulls are going to get mangled anyway...

 

[DontFeedPhil]

Like Union Elf said, it comes down to whether one of the ships your talking about is the hero ship. Then I can see it doing alright. Meaning if it needs to be able to handle a Borg ship for the story to work then yeah, sure. But realistically the whole original idea of the Borg was that they can take whatever you throw at them and if you dont destroy them on the first salvo...well your done. Cause they will learn from your first attempt and that means that your next attempt wont work or at least wont work nearly as well. Result...Your dead.
It really doesnt matter what class the ship is or how many marines it has. Or if you like it. If your being realistic (and were talking Star Trek here) the Borg would win and the Federation and most of the galaxy would be assimilated in a matter of years...

 

[Praetor]

Yeah, I think mostly which ship did well was based mostly on writer preference, and as Captain Jerk says, as originally portrayed if you don't get them by the second or third salvo, you're screwed.

Based on observation though, I think that Akira-onwards ships of at least medium size can be expected to fare well, or at least have a good chance of survival, and one might surmise that's because they were specifically designed (or redesigned) thusly. The Defiant didn't do well in FC, but then they had to get Worf on the Enterprise somehow.

Coming into this thread I thought that someone was going to draw a comparison between older ships such as the Galactica doing well against the Cylons vis a vis older Starfleet ships doing well against the Borg, and in my head, Lorne Green's voice intoned:

'Fleeing from the Borg tyranny, the last Starfleet ship, Enterprise, leads a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest. A shining planet, known... as Ceti Alpha V.'

 

[jolau]

If "Best Of Both Worlds" is of any indication, I would say a few ships at Wolf 359 were of at least late-TMP era, and of course some of these on both the Federation (Excelsiors and Mirandas at least) and Klingon fleets (K'tingas and B'rels at least) may still be active during the Dominion War.

Praetor- An early episode of "Hidden Frontier" comes to mind with that one.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Ye=The Defiant didn't do well in FC, but then they had to get Worf on the Enterprise somehow.

Well, we don't know how long the Defiant was in the battle. After all, the fleet engaged the Borg just before the Enterprise-E left from the Neutral Zone. That trip obviously wasn't instantaneous, indeed it would have taken a few hours at best.

Of course, one could also assume that Starfleet's ships were getting burnt up like flash paper and the only reason they were doing any real damage was because they had tons of ships lined up in waves to keep the pressure on the Borg... Defiant could have just been part of the latest wave.

 

[nx1701g]

I wonder if you used them as a first wave of ships - I know unorthodox because of their weaker weapons - if they could be an asset as they engage the enemy. Their weapons are older and probably on a different modulation from the newer weapons of the 24th Century. They could be used as the first wave against the Borg then you have the newer vessels come in to attack. It might have some effect and help to overcome their regeneration, at least for a time.

 

[Kaziarl]

The NX-01 seemed to do ok, so I can imagine the miranda and constitution class would too.

 

[JNG]

I don't think any of the ships have any sort of real chance against the Borg. The difference in effectiveness between any two of them seems really unimportant. They are all products of a general level of technology significantly inferior to that of the Borg, and none of the battles against the Borg were directly won through use of conventional weapons anyway. A ship of the Chandley class or any other apocryphal design would be of similar effectiveness to other ships we've seen, in that they would be swatted like flies without some special intelligence, trick of time travel or any of the other healthy doses of luck which have enabled Our Heroes to hold out against the Borg so far.

 

[Deks]

The NX-01 seemed to do ok, so I can imagine the miranda and constitution class would too.

The NX-01 went up against a simple SF transport (which was extremely weak from the get go) that was in the process of assimilation.
The drones (and their nanites) had a lot things to do on that ship in order to upgrade it to 24th century levels (which would of course take time and present the NX-01 with the opportunity to destroy the ship before it actually became a serious threat).

As for original/movie era SF ships ...
They can be usable as long as SF upgrades them completely in terms of weapons/shields/hull enhancement/computers and uses as a first wave of ships which would be followed by a second wave of the recent design.

Granted of course, the upgraded ships by themselves would have a good opportunity to destroy the Borg if thoroughly upgraded and if their captains implement a good strategy.

Let's face it, most of the things we saw on screen happened so that main heroes would shine best.
Otherwise, there would have been dozens, if not thousands of other crews who would have came to the same conclusion.

 

[Kaziarl]

The NX-01 seemed to do ok, so I can imagine the miranda and constitution class would too.

The NX-01 went up against a simple SF transport (which was extremely weak from the get go) that was in the process of assimilation.
The drones (and their nanites) had a lot things to do on that ship in order to upgrade it to 24th century levels (which would of course take time and present the NX-01 with the opportunity to destroy the ship before it actually became a serious threat).

As for original/movie era SF ships ...
They can be usable as long as SF upgrades them completely in terms of weapons/shields/hull enhancement/computers and uses as a first wave of ships which would be followed by a second wave of the recent design.

Granted of course, the upgraded ships by themselves would have a good opportunity to destroy the Borg if thoroughly upgraded and if their captains implement a good strategy.

Let's face it, most of the things we saw on screen happened so that main heroes would shine best.
Otherwise, there would have been dozens, if not thousands of other crews who would have came to the same conclusion.

True, and I'd like to think that ep was a result of a two week long beer binge. Although one things keeps coming to mind, Dr Phlox was infected with the nanites, was he not? And if so, he got rid of them. So how come that wasn't in starfleet records when the enterprise d encountered them?

 

[BolianAuthor]

They would be very useful... as cannon fodder.

We also saw ENDLESS amounts of Mirandas, Excelsiors, and Centaurs in combat with the Dominion forces, and they were all on the front lines, in the major battles, where almost all of them exploded.

 

[Plecostomus]

True, and I'd like to think that ep was a result of a two week long beer binge. Although one things keeps coming to mind, Dr Phlox was infected with the nanites, was he not? And if so, he got rid of them. So how come that wasn't in starfleet records when the enterprise d encountered them?

This is actually quite easy: The records could have been lost, he might not have recorded the method, further research could have shown that the method was extremely harmful to the patient, or it could have been classified along with so much of the Borg stuff to the point that it was overlooked. Then again the Borg could have adapted to the method.

And who's to say that Beverly didn't use this method to help clean up Picard after they got him back? So much of the rebuilding and repair of The Man happened off-screen.


Or we could cop out and remind ourselves the nanoprobes and related technology was invented by WRITERS years AFTER Best Of Both Worlds and there is no active studio-driven effort to retcon everything together... That'd be a fun project but one that won't ever happen.

In my personal canon (RPG stuff) I have The Borg stuff so highly classifed under different levels and spread across many branches that it hampers research. Only a few people even knew of them, and they were told to keep it silent, only a handful dared to do anything about it until Picard brought back reports that They Were On The Way, even then vital information was overlooked or witheld by people protecting their turf. Shelby and JP Hanson were in charge of sifting through all this stuff to make a viable defense... things would be missed, overlooked, deemed irrelevent (ha) or just plain discarded because they were looking to deal with the Borg in space... they weren't anticipating the assimilation of key fleet members.

 

[Manticore]

Plus, I believe that the episode implied that his physiology was a key part in slowing and stopping the nanoprobes, which obviously wouldn't apply to the apparently Denobulan-free crew of the Enterprise-D or -E.

 

[Marie1]

I don't think any of the ships have any sort of real chance against the Borg.

Sure- a bunch of ships like Prometheus that can apparently be used by EMH's accidentally resting their hands on panels...

And no casualties for the Federation that way!

 

[JNG]

If the ships overburned their warp drives to serve as high-warp flying bombs en masse, some might get through and strike the Borg ship to some effect. They'd definitely have to do it at warp, as the flying bombs from the Mars Defense Perimeter didn't have a heck of a lot of luck doing it at sublight and even if the ships were destroyed slightly less quickly, they could be smacked around by that tractor beam pretty easily.

 

[Deks]

Let's keep in mind that what the writers did on screen was an extremely limited interpretation of the events.

If the Star Trek universe were real, don't you think that SF would behave a bit more intelligently than THAT?
They are responsible for safeguarding the Federation ... an interstellar organization.
What we do here is essentially justify the writers failures because they either didn't have enough time to flesh out the story, or just wanted to come up with the quickest solution that portrays our 'heroes' in the best possible light.

Had this been a real life situation, I fairly doubt the Mars perimeter would encompass the 4 small drone-like ships.

SF was portrayed in a slightly ridiculous and limiting manner.

Phlox indeed had a different biology (which was explained in the Enterprise episode 'Regeneration') which was explained in a manner that his immune system was more aggressive than other species which gave him time to come up with a therapy (which was also explained as extremely harmful to humans) that would help him get rid of the nanoprobes.

I would suspect there are a lot of things that could have happened on why the Enterprise-D was not aware of the Borg when they first encountered them.
Real-life explanation: That was the first time the writers thought of them.
In-universe explanation: Anything could have happened ... but I strongly disagree that in a highly advanced technological age of 22nd, 23rd and 24th centuries data would be corrupted.

Nah ... probably safely hidden away, and only given to a selected few.
But rumors survive, which could have been the basis for Annika's parents going to chase their theories about the Borg, and SF was mainly skeptic about it (or were they trying to discourage the Hansens from seeking out a very dangerous race that resembles cybernetic beings the NX-01 encountered)?.

There are numerous possibilities to consider.
While I agree it's problematic, but it's hardly impossible to connect it all together while not changing the timeline in the process.
True, some of the things the writers did were plainly bad writing ... but some other aspects are salvageable.