Best of Both Worlds Nitpick Special
- Thread starter dregj
- Start date
Well, not at that speed!
That's the thing: the faster they go, the less time it takes - not just in terms of distance divided by speed, but in Einsteinian terms. If they did accelerate to lightspeed, Einstein sez the trip would take zero time... For them, that is.
And since Wes is discussing a situation where our heroes implicitly chase the Cube, that is, do what the Borg do, then the trip will take less time for our heroes as well.
There's no contradiction with known physics in it taking 27 minutes from Saturn (actually, Jupiter in dialogue terms) to Earth at sublight. The contradiction is in the Borg choosing sublight over warp, even though warp supposedly is faster. Sure, they apparently want to visit and destroy all the scenic highlights, from Saturn to Jupiter to Mars, before taking on Earth. But they could still warp-hop from one location to another. In "Elaan of Troyius", Kirk's crew think it virtually unprecedented that Kirk wouldn't warp-hop from planet to planet... So, what is different here?
Timo Saloniemi
I'm no physicist or mathematician, so I'm sure your knowledge of this subject surpasses mine.
But it appears to me that the writers of BOBW were adhering to the TMP convention that warp travel inside a solar system is dangerous and should be avoided. While a ship traveling at an appreciable percentage of light speed could certainly reach Earth very quickly (for them, at least) it seems that ships on Star Trek always avoid relativistic velocities and definitely did in this case, otherwise from the perspective of the folks on Earth the Borg would have been in-system for years, enough time to devise new anti-Borg weapons, construct a new fleet of ships in Earth orbit, and train new crews.
The thing is, there's no "always" in the avoidance of either insystem warp travel or high relativistic speeds.
Indeed, there are only three cases in all of Trek where it is suggested that warp travel inside a star system would be risky, and in one of the explicit cases (DS9 "By Inferno's Light") it is conducted nevertheless (TMP being the other explicit case, but probably just due to the untested engines, and "BoBW" being the odd implicit case). And impulse travel is never treated as a thing to be avoided or subjected to limitations, except perhaps in "The Doomsday Machine" where it consumes fuel at a frightening rate.
OTOH, even if our heroes put the pedal to the metal in "BoBW", the outside world would still see them arrive in a jiffy, close to the speed of light; that the heroes themselves would experience just a few minutes or seconds would not be a problem. Time "outside" would not stretch to years as the result of our heroes moving fast.
Anyway, the heroes probably know how to strike a good balance between the pros and cons of insystem warp and impulse, choosing the right alternative and the optimal parameters for it. That they choose the same parameters as the Borg in "BoBW" is probably our best indication that they know exactly what they are doing!
Timo Saloniemi
Indeed, there are only three cases in all of Trek where it is suggested that warp travel inside a star system would be risky, and in one of the explicit cases (DS9 "By Inferno's Light") it is conducted nevertheless (TMP being the other explicit case, but probably just due to the untested engines, and "BoBW" being the odd implicit case). And impulse travel is never treated as a thing to be avoided or subjected to limitations, except perhaps in "The Doomsday Machine" where it consumes fuel at a frightening rate.
OTOH, even if our heroes put the pedal to the metal in "BoBW", the outside world would still see them arrive in a jiffy, close to the speed of light; that the heroes themselves would experience just a few minutes or seconds would not be a problem. Time "outside" would not stretch to years as the result of our heroes moving fast.
Anyway, the heroes probably know how to strike a good balance between the pros and cons of insystem warp and impulse, choosing the right alternative and the optimal parameters for it. That they choose the same parameters as the Borg in "BoBW" is probably our best indication that they know exactly what they are doing!
Timo Saloniemi
I always pictured something more like this:
The Borg: Taking the addition of technological distinctiveness and taking it to an entirely different level.
This is something I posted some time ago in some other TBOBW thread, I think it'll fit here nicely too.
My own version of what happened...
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
without part 2
Is it possible? Yes. Why? Well, because... I'm weird and some little things annoy me, like when Worf and Data are rescuing Picard from the cube, the only resistance they encounter are few drones, earlier there was a forcefield preventing the Enterprise crew from getting to him, now, it was gone... why didn't the Borg try harder to protect Locutus... maybe they didn't see a problem, even if they lost him. And the shuttle thing... they just fly in and get him?
Anyway, I think part 1 is awesome and part 2 somehow isn't...
SO, my solution is to not watch the second part. How's that possible you may wonder? Well, since Picard is not a know-it-all engineer when it comes to technology and may not know 100% how the Enterprise's deflector weapon operates, maybe the Borg didn't get enough information from him to adapt in time for the weapon.
So, my own little storyline continues from ”To Be Continued” moment... Riker orders Worf to fire, he does and... the weapon works and the Borg cube is seriously damaged. At that time Riker orders Picard to be transported to the Enterprise. After that... well, maybe they just continue firing and there is not much if anything left of the cube... Picard is ”transformed” back into human like in the end of part 2. (And then to the next episode....) Simple.
My own version of what happened...
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
without part 2
Is it possible? Yes. Why? Well, because... I'm weird and some little things annoy me, like when Worf and Data are rescuing Picard from the cube, the only resistance they encounter are few drones, earlier there was a forcefield preventing the Enterprise crew from getting to him, now, it was gone... why didn't the Borg try harder to protect Locutus... maybe they didn't see a problem, even if they lost him. And the shuttle thing... they just fly in and get him?
Anyway, I think part 1 is awesome and part 2 somehow isn't...
SO, my solution is to not watch the second part. How's that possible you may wonder? Well, since Picard is not a know-it-all engineer when it comes to technology and may not know 100% how the Enterprise's deflector weapon operates, maybe the Borg didn't get enough information from him to adapt in time for the weapon.
So, my own little storyline continues from ”To Be Continued” moment... Riker orders Worf to fire, he does and... the weapon works and the Borg cube is seriously damaged. At that time Riker orders Picard to be transported to the Enterprise. After that... well, maybe they just continue firing and there is not much if anything left of the cube... Picard is ”transformed” back into human like in the end of part 2. (And then to the next episode....) Simple.
this is why my brother hits me
Space Irish? 
JB
JB
This line:
Worf: The Borg have neither honor or courage. That is our greatest advantage.
Yeah Worf, please explain that. They don't have the concepts of honor or courage, but they are impervious to our weapons, so how do honor and courage help us win?
In the end it was planning and the help of Picard that won the day.
Worf: The Borg have neither honor or courage. That is our greatest advantage.
Yeah Worf, please explain that. They don't have the concepts of honor or courage, but they are impervious to our weapons, so how do honor and courage help us win?
In the end it was planning and the help of Picard that won the day.
To Worf, dying well is the greater victory over living as a coward and a slave.
Courage allowed the Enterprise to pursue and defeat the Borg without even knowing how they could accomplish that; when the rational choice was to set a course in the opposite direction and flee.
Courage won the day. The Borg did not factor human perseverence into their strategy or they might not have made themselves vulnerable by kidnapping Picard.
It takes courage not to give up in the face of overwhelming defeat.
Courage allowed the Enterprise to pursue and defeat the Borg without even knowing how they could accomplish that; when the rational choice was to set a course in the opposite direction and flee.
Courage won the day. The Borg did not factor human perseverence into their strategy or they might not have made themselves vulnerable by kidnapping Picard.
It takes courage not to give up in the face of overwhelming defeat.
Worf's the sort to lack the courage to give up, though. He'd rather die than face defeat, meaning Starfleet loses an officer for no good reason. That's as good as treason in certain situations.
Could Worf have had a plan here, or the beginnings of one, involving exploiting the Borg lack of honor? People acting on a purely utilitarian basis might be predictable, a tangible weakness - but surely people acting with honor would be predictable as well.
Yet as with above, people without courage might pick their fights on different logic to that of people with courage - and there Worf has it exactly right, since it does turn out that the Borg skip those fights in which they see no benefit. A courageous fighter would slay his enemies just because; the Borg let intruders aboard their ship because they lack Worf's version of courage.
Timo Saloniemi
Could Worf have had a plan here, or the beginnings of one, involving exploiting the Borg lack of honor? People acting on a purely utilitarian basis might be predictable, a tangible weakness - but surely people acting with honor would be predictable as well.
Yet as with above, people without courage might pick their fights on different logic to that of people with courage - and there Worf has it exactly right, since it does turn out that the Borg skip those fights in which they see no benefit. A courageous fighter would slay his enemies just because; the Borg let intruders aboard their ship because they lack Worf's version of courage.
Timo Saloniemi
chief o brienSpace Irish?
JB
or as my dad called him the ship's bouncer
It just caught me unawares, dregj!
JB
JB
There was no such TMP "convention". The only time a risk was implied was that they had to risk warp drive with their as-yet-untested-engines while still within the solar system. But at the end of the movie the engine-balanced ship goes to warp basically from Earth orbit without a concern.
There's also DS9 "By Inferno's Light" where warp inside a star system goes smoothly (just like in every DS9 episode featuring the Defiant!) despite Kira and Dax having some banter about it. We could even read that banter as establishing that using warp drive insystem is so safe that people make jokes about other people worrying about it...
What does seem consistent is that warp inside a star system is never particularly fast, and gets the slower, the closer you go to the star. This is especially evident in those episodes and movies involving the slingshot time travel maneuver. Possibly at some point people simply get fed up and switch to impulse, but different skippers have different tolerances for that.
Timo Saloniemi
What does seem consistent is that warp inside a star system is never particularly fast, and gets the slower, the closer you go to the star. This is especially evident in those episodes and movies involving the slingshot time travel maneuver. Possibly at some point people simply get fed up and switch to impulse, but different skippers have different tolerances for that.
Timo Saloniemi
Wanted to start a new thread, but I suppose I can ask it as well in this thread, since it is already about BOBW weirdness:
After Data and Worf have abducted Locutus from the Borg cube, why do the Borg fire at and destroy their shuttle?
Seems they would gain very little by that and only risk losing Locutus (whom they had put some more-than-usual-effort into, to "acquire"). Or did they only fire after they knew Locutus was 'safe', transport having been initiated ?
After Data and Worf have abducted Locutus from the Borg cube, why do the Borg fire at and destroy their shuttle?
Seems they would gain very little by that and only risk losing Locutus (whom they had put some more-than-usual-effort into, to "acquire"). Or did they only fire after they knew Locutus was 'safe', transport having been initiated ?
I think that's because Part I set up an impossible situation, and Part II, by necessity, needed to find ways to make it less impossible.
What I like about Part II is that the writers didn't back away from that challenge. They could have had the deflector weapon work, as you suggested -- and damage the cube -- or found some magic technobabble to make the phasers and torpedoes effective again, or have Geordi and Data might have come up with some kind of bomb to introduce during the recovery mission. But they didn't. Instead they found a way to use one of the things that make the Borg so formidable -- their interconnectedness -- against them. They used their heads, and had our heroes use their head (literally, in the case of Data, lol), and that really appealed to me.
They managed to defeat the Borg without neutering them as writers of subsequent stories seemed to find necessary.
We can always assume that Picard was having some influence over what Locutus did, and made suggestions to the Collective that seemed reasonable on the surface (stop to fight at Wolf 359, stop to fight at Saturn, Jupiter and Mars) but had an ulterior motive (stop before you get to Earth so that my friends can catch up). Locutus did enjoy some sort of an expert status during the operations against Starfleet, so he might have been able to arrange for his own kidnapping back to the E-D, too.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi