23rd Century Borg Attack ?

[DumbDumb2007]

With the events of Captain Archer's experience with the Borg not publicly disclosed and obviuously kept secret by Section 31,would the Borg have attacked anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant ? Would Starfleet have kept it a secret ?
Could the Doomsday Weapon from season 2 of TOS have been an Anti Borg Weapon ? I remember hearing something about William Windom talking about an Anti-proton Beam and then there was talk in season 2 of Next Gen of an anti proton Beam ..
Would the Doomsday Machine have been sent out a random by whoever manufactured it to engage random Borg ships wherever they were in the Galaxy ? Maybe it was malfunctioning when the Enterprise located it ?
Was it an intention in 1989 to do a sequel story to the Doomsday Machine bringing the Borg in to it ?

 

[cultcross]

DumbDumb2007 said:
Could the Doomsday Weapon from season 2 of TOS have been an Anti Borg Weapon ? I remember hearing something about William Windom talking about an Anti-proton Beam and then there was talk in season 2 of Next Gen of an anti proton Beam ..
Would the Doomsday Machine have been sent out a random by whoever manufactured it to engage random Borg ships wherever they were in the Galaxy ? Maybe it was malfunctioning when the Enterprise located it ?

I don't know about the Borg attacking Starfleet in the 23rd C - but this is an interesting idea about the original intention of the Doomsday device.

Tbh, we know little about how advanced the Borg were at this time in history - it's suggested (The Omega Directive, for example), that their species designation numbers were still well under 400 at this point, so the probably hadn't done a great deal of expanding. The likelihood of them being this far into the alpha quadrant this early seems remote. And, as the Borg for FC went back in time and sent their message before it was known how much damage the Federation would do to the Borg (Endgame etc) they'd have no real reason to expend vast resources getting here asap.

 

[ChristopherPike]

Sounds like the plot of Peter David's TNG book, Vendetta.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Vendetta

If you've never read it, try online auction sites or second hand bookshops. It's worth a look as I recall.

The Doomsday Machine came from outside our Galaxy according to a line of dialogue in TOS. So Starfleet had nothing to do with its creation.

 

[Timo]

...their species designation numbers were still well under 400 at this point, so the probably hadn't done a great deal of expanding. The likelihood of them being this far into the alpha quadrant this early seems remote.

Then again, the Ferengi are #180. And #259 in "The Gift" were said to be from Galactic Cluster Three, which sounds rather distant. Possibly the Borg give catalog numbers to species well before they are assimilated (in the sense of the entire species being assimilated), allowing them to first visit the Alpha species tens of thousands of years ago.

The Doomsday Machine came from outside our Galaxy according to a line of dialogue in TOS.

To be sure, most of those lines in the episode were poorly grounded speculation on Kirk's part. We have little indication that the machine really would have been built as a "doomsday device" for an ancient war. And just because it seemed to come from a certain direction doesn't mean it originated from outside our galaxy.

There's plenty of room for speculation there, including the takes of Peter David and Margaret Wander Bonnano. But I don't think the DDM would make for a very good anti-Borg weapon. Its antiproton death ray didn't kill even ordinary human 23rd century starships with one shot. What chance would it stand against a Borg cube? And when the Borg adapted to that weapon, it would represent a huge amount of wasted effort.

A somewhat likelier scenario for DDM utilization would be a "berserker" mission: destroy as many habitable planets as you can, so nobody there will ever become a threat to the DDM-launching species. As for an anti-Borg scenario, I'd think the smartest thing to do would be to go into hiding. The Aldeans may have had the right idea with their planetary cloak, but deliberate diaspora and abandoning of the vulnerable homeworld might also be a valid strategy.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Excelsior]

Was it not said that the Doomsday Machine originated in another galaxy though?

 

[cooleddie74]

Yes, Spock said its trajectory through Federation space and our section of the galaxy showed a route that originated outside the Milky Way. From another galaxy.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I thought it was created by some pilgrims...cornucopia of death!

 

[Timo]

Yes, Spock said its trajectory through Federation space and our section of the galaxy showed a route that originated outside the Milky Way. From another galaxy.

There's so much wrong with what Spock says... How is he able to backtrack the thing's route, when moments ago he couldn't tell that the star system they were in had been visited by the device? How can a number of waypoints establish a point of origin, when nothing is known of total travel time? How could the device span intergalactic distances, when it apparently needs to stop and forage fairly frequently, and quickly becomes sluggish when malnourished?

It should be possible for what Spock says to be true. But the leaps of logic that he and Kirk make would require some sort of explication for the conclusions to be believable.

Of course, "DDM" was to the machine what "Q Who?" was to the Borg - a first contact with something truly mysterious. It was only too plausible that our TNG heroes got so much wrong about the Borg in that introductory episode. Kirk, too, could later have found intriguing things about the DDM and its possible siblings if the writers had given him the chance. The couple of novelists that dealt with this didn't explore too far into the fantastic, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[KDoug]

I agree with Timo. The extra-galactic origin theory involves a lot of speculation, based upon very little evidence. Just because they can track a little bit of its trajectory, who can say (without further investigation) that its path before that point had to be in a straight line? It could be a curved path. It could even be a very meandering path.

 

[Ronald Held]

Perhaps there were only a few systems along the trajectory, before it "exited" the galaxy?

 

[cooleddie74]

Jack Bauer said:
I thought it was created by some pilgrims...cornucopia of death!

A couple of years back the TOS forums made lots of jokes about the Planet Killer looking like a gigantic Bugles snack chip.

 

[KDoug]

"Perhaps there were only a few systems along the trajectory, before it "exited" the galaxy?"



But how could anyone be sure that the planet killer couldn't have veered to one side or another before it came to those systems? Why couldn't it have been taking a scenic route inside the edge of our galaxy before saying to itself, "hey, it looks like there's more food in that direction. I'm gonna go that way now."?

 

[Ronald Held]

We don't.

 

[aridas sofia]

The more I think about it, the more I like the (supposedly Roddenberry-conceived) idea that the Machine Planet that created Vejur might have been Borg, or also created the Borg.

In that case, the 23rd century TMP could be seen as the first Borg attack.

 

[FalTorPan]

As I imagine what the Borg might have looked like had they been conceived during the original series, I can't help but think that they might not look much different than they did in their TNG debut -- skin-tight diving suits with lots of technowhatsits attached.

 

[cooleddie74]

Ronald Held said:
We don't.

Agreed. But let's face facts. Having Spock voice the line that it comes from another galaxy altogether makes the weapon seem all the more alien and threatening. That's why the script was written that way. End of story.