Disclaimer: This is not a story idea mere forum speculation as to an alternate ending of the Star Trek Destiny Trilogy. So the Borg were totally intent on exterminating the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans. What were their objectives after this? Exterminate or assimilate the rest of the AQ? Finish off the remaining powers in the DQ? Would a fully Borgified Alpha Quadrant been fit to wage war against the Dominion? Thoughts?
The thing to remember is that to the Borg, the Alpha Quadrant is an afterthought. They were based in the Delta Quadrant and had been conquering it for millennia. They were no doubt concerned mainly with continuing to expand their borders and assimilate the hundreds of DQ civilizations that were battling against their encroachment. They'd extended feelers into other quadrants of the galaxy, sent the occasional scouting cube to look for other interesting technology, but what they found out there in those remote territories was of secondary concern to them. That's why they only sent one cube at a time to attack the Federation in BoBW and First Contact. It was an interesting curiosity, and then a minor nuisance, but still a very distant and incidental concern compared to the stuff they had to deal with closer to home. But then Voyager destroyed their transwarp hub and crippled their galactic travel network, and at that point they reassessed the Federation from "minor nuisance" to "major threat." So destroying the Federation became a top priority and they allocated a massive fleet of ships to the task, though it took them a few years to find a way to reach UFP space without their transwarp network. Once they'd completed destroying the UFP, the threat would've been neutralized and they would've simply gone back to normal operations. They might have continued to expand on their foothold in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants, as long as they already had a bunch of cubes there, but their primary focus would still have been in Delta.
In "Dark Frontier", for some reason, the queen seems convinced that direct assaults were never going to work. http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/517.htm "QUEEN: Your knowledge for the target species is invaluable. Species five six one eight. Human. Warp capable. Origin, grid three two five. Physiology inefficient, below average cranial capacity, minimal redundant systems, limited regenerative abilities. Our previous attempts to assimilate them were all direct assaults. They failed, so we've created a more surreptitious strategy."
Again, it's a matter of allocating resources. Before "Endgame," the Federation was of interest, but not the Collective's sole priority, because it's a big galaxy. They tried a direct assault with one cube at a time because it wasn't a high enough priority to warrant diverting more resources from matters closer to home. When those assaults led to the loss of the allocated resources, the Collective chose an even more economical strategy, one of infiltration and study, rather than throwing more good money after bad, as it were. They were patient and could afford to wait, and they still had other priorities closer to home. The destruction of the transwarp hub changed that: It proved that the Federation was a serious threat to the Borg and therefore could no longer be suffered to exist. "Endgame" essentially upgraded the UFP to the same threat level as Species 8472, or nearly the same, and so the Borg escalated their response commensurately.
You mean in this hypothetical Borg-win version of post-Destiny history? Yeah, I'd say a force of seven thousand cubes and God knows how many smaller support ships would be more than capable of defeating the Dominion, since its forces combined with the Cardassian Union's and Breen Confederacy's were not capable of defeating the Federation/Klingon/Romulan fleets.
I assume you mean if they'd won. Why would that have figured into their plans? The Dominion was nearly as distant from their territory as the Federation was, and there'd been little to no interaction between them to give the Borg reason to see them as a near-term threat. But keep in mind that the Borg's territory is hundreds of times larger than either Federation or Dominion space. They sent a fair portion of their fleet to conquer the UFP, but their total resources were much greater still. And if they'd won, then they wouldn't have sustained that many losses in their all-out assault. They would've had plenty of time to regroup, rebuild, and resume their gradual expansion and assimilation of the galaxy, which would eventually have brought them into conflict with the Dominion.
We're not even 100% sure that the initial borg cube *was* a direct assault. It may have been that the cube that first encountered the Enterprise, having scanned it and determined its location, simply upped sticks, drove to the Federation for two years, then tried to assimilate Earth, just as a matter of course. It may have been that the Borg knew that even if the cube failed to assimilate Earth, they knew that failure would stimulate a technological burst as the Federation struggled to counter this new foe, thus providing them with a more 'teched up' society to conquer at a later date. It's difficult to say what their motivations are as they probably come at problems in a very alien way.
No, the Borg were in the area months before "Q Who." Remember, the first season finale "The Neutral Zone" set up the mystery of outposts along the UFP/Romulan border being scooped up by some unknown force. It was later discovered that planets assimilated by the Borg showed the same pattern of destruction, confirming that they were the ones who'd destroyed those border outposts. So the Borg's examination of the Alpha/Beta Quadrants precedes the Enterprise-D's encounter, although that encounter probably did precipitate the Collective's decision to take a more active interest in the Federation.
And then there's the stupid writing from VOY and ENT that portrays the main Borg as having become aware at some point that they would undertake a temporal operation at Earth in 2373/2063, and yet the Borg apparently did nothing with their foreknowledge.
First off, it doesn't make sense to criticize VGR for a story point that wasn't established until ENT. (Yes, Seven mentioned the events of First Contact in "Relativity," but that was after that film, not before.) Second, it was clearly stated at the end of ENT: "Regeneration" that the signal the time-displaced Borg sent would take 200 years to reach the Delta Quadrant -- so presumably that's what prompted the Borg to send the cube that sniffed around the Neutral Zone in the first place.
Small correction-Seven first mentions the Borg involvement in first contact in Year of Hell stating the Borg were "present" at that event. It is later acknowledged in Relativity as well as an example of the Pogo paradox- the Borg tried to stop the event yet triggered the event to occur.
Which also takes place after FC, so it still doesn't give any indication that the Borg had "foreknowledge" of the event.
Good point. Also, given that the Hansen's were investigating the Borg years prior to Picard's initial contact with them, they seem to have been working on some rumours about their existence, possibly derived from Archer's encounter with them; Zefram or Lily's words, passed down through the generations somehow (Zerfram's drunken rant, maybe Lily tweeted about her crazy day?); or one of the El-Aurian's initial contact with them after fleeing their home planet in the wake of the Borg destruction (possibly even Guinan herself, but also possibly from Soran or any other unknown El-Aurian). (as an aside, this information may have found renewed importance when Shelby was assigned the role of 'Borg expert' after the events of 'Q Who?'. A lot of previously apocryphal information may have been re-assessed in light of Picard's report.)
I still love First Contact..... "The Borg have their invasion of the Federation, and this time, there may be no stopping them." "How many ships?" "One."
This x 1000!!!! The Destiny novels did address this, and painted scenes of many Borg cubes swarming into the Alpha Quadrant. The idea that a full invasion would only include one cube always seemed off to me.
You know what I would have done? Intercept the cube in interstellar space and blow it with an isolytic subspace warhead. Worry about the legal consequences later; it's the damn Borg!
A recent issue of Star Trek: Boldly Go had a not-dissimilar solution to dealing with the Borg, when Spoiler: Boldly Go Spoilers Captain Kirk beams over dozens of photon torpedoes onto a Borg sphere, and mass-detonates them. Way back in 1990, when BoBW aired, I was basically wondering why the Enterprise-D crew didn't execute essentially the same tactic during their own particular Borg-situation, once they'd performed a few infiltrations and gathered enough recon-intel (as we saw in "Q Who" and BoBW).