Borg Vulnerabilities: What Killed That Guy Anyway?

Discussion in 'General Trek Discussion' started by Thomas_Sullivan, Oct 12, 2020.

  1. Thomas_Sullivan

    Thomas_Sullivan Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    There is a scene in VOY: Dark Frontier where our heroes beam a photon torpedo aboard a Borg scout ship while it was adjusting its defense screens and accidentally destroy the vessel (they were hoping to disable it.) During this sequence, when the torpedo explodes, we can see it literally vaporize a Borg drone. My question is...well...what killed that guy anyway?

    Was he killed by the sheer kinetic energy of the explosion, the shockwave, or the heat/fire caused by it? It's always interested me because answering this question would answer certain questions about the vulnerabilities of Borg drone's defensive shields. For instance, are the Borg able to protect themselves from fire, which crosses the line between physical and (heat) energy?

    So, what do you think? What killed that guy anyway?
     
  2. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    All of the above.
     
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  3. Tim Thomason

    Tim Thomason Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Here's a video of that scene (the photon torpedo is beamed over at 1:45).

    It doesn't look like anyone is vaporized, at least in the Trek use of the term. A small explosion, perhaps indicative of the initial antimatter colliding with matter, fills up the screen (if you freeze-frame it, the actor might "disappear" for a frame, but that's a problem with the special effects, and not indicative of a vaporization). That spot is never seen again, so we can maybe assume the Borg opening the casing was simply flown back a couple feet into the wall and set on fire. We cut immediately to another shot of the fireball engulfing the ship, and yet another shot of a different drone being flung back by a fireball. Then outside the ship, where explosions rock both sides of the scout ship. Seven reveals later that it exploded near a power matrix, and this is a chain reaction we are witnessing, not the usual yield expected of this particular photon torpedo.
     
  4. Bry_Sinclair

    Bry_Sinclair Vice Admiral Admiral

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    A photon torpedo is a matter/antimatter explosive, the same thing that powers ships to warp speed, so that would be a fairly destructive force.
     
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  5. Oddish

    Oddish Admiral Admiral

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    The dark side of E = MC^2, to be sure.
     
  6. Tenacity

    Tenacity Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    X-rays, from the release of energy of the antimatter converting to energy. He (it) evaporated.
     
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  7. Deks

    Deks Vice Admiral Admiral

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    A photon torpedo is basically an anti-matter warhead (a very powerful one at that with yields in high gigaton to high teraton range - thanks to the baseline effect or matter and anti-matter reaction being significantly enhanced through subspace technology/hw inside the torpedo).

    My guess is that a photon torpedo implements some of the properties that are also found in phasers because it has the ability to vaporize targets much like phasers do. Destructive yes, but also precise.

    So, its highly probable the drone was killed through a combination of all factors you mentioned, and probably numerous others).

    The Borg may be able to protect themselves from fire and various other attacks, however, they did not expect this kind of an attack, so they wouldn't be able to adapt to it... but even if they have, I doubt a drone's personal force-field would be powerful enough to stop a sheer power of a photon torpedo blowing up in its face.

    We also don't know if Borg adaptation has a limit.
    Some people suggested that if you pour enough energy into it, you'd be able to overload the Borg's adaptation ability (and that thus far, Borg simply have that much more spare capacity because they are much more advanced than other species)... but my guess is that this is not how this works.

    We've seen that Trek technology (and by extension Federation and Borg technology) is based on subspace properties, and therefore, when you adjust shields to the weapons inverse frequency you can prevent those weapons from hitting the ship and instead collide with the shields with 0 damage to the shields.
    But what happens to the energy from the weapons fire that impacts the shields? Where does it go?
    My guess is its simply 'cancelled out' by the frequency adjustment... so in the end, it wouldn't matter how much energy you pour into the weapons, the shields would simply cancel it out (like two standing waves cancelling each other out).

    Adjusting frequencies on weapons to the shield frequencies can also help you bypass them... and this is exactly what Voyager did in Dark Frontier... by sufficiently damaging the Borg probe, they found a fluctuation in the shields and managed to beam a torpedo through it (likely with 7's assistance).
    They also repeated the same trick in Season 7 when Tuvok, Janeway and Torres beamed to the Tactical Cube from the Delta Flyer in the middle of the battle.
    Voyager assaulted the cube and created a fluctuation in the shields... and by aligning the transporters to match that fluctuation frequency, they managed to beam in.

    My guess is that this particular exploit might not have worked if 7 of 9 was not part of Voyager's crew. Sure, we've seen that transporters can beam through shields if you knew the frequency, however, a simpler shield 'fluctuation' is hardly what I would call 'sufficient' for breaking through Borg shields. I'm thinking 7 of 9 found a way to use this to their advantage and allow stuff to beam through by the time Dark Frontier rolled out and refined the method when they engaged the Tactical Cube 2 years later.
     
  8. matthunter

    matthunter Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, I don't think any amount of personal shielding was going to help against an explosion designed to blow through ship-level defences. For comparison, the advanced drone that was created in Drone had 29th Century technology and his super-shield (multi-spatial! nifty!) only barely allowed him to survive the implosion of a ship within a proto-nebula caused by intense gravity.
     
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  9. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I concur, and most Borg Drones run off some form of Battery, ergo Regeneration to refill the energy supply.

    While the 29th Century Drone had advanced Multi-Spatial (I interpret that phrase as Multi-Layer Shields that cover Regular Space and some layers Sub-Space simultaneously), there's a limit to the amount of energy output the drone body can produce.

    Ship level energy output is on a different tier than individual "Drone/Person" level output.

    It's like sending a human with a phaser rifle against a fully decked out and armed Shuttle Craft.

    Even if you gave the human an advantage of the Shuttle Craft being grappled down and locked into it's landing pad, the sheer shield strength and weapon energy output would over whelm anything an individual person can output.

    Just completely different scales of output / defense / energy production.