Borg Question...

[Gil T.Azell]

If they had assimilated some Romulans and Klingons why did they not have "Cloaking" abilities?
This would have made them very formatible.
(if this has been asked before I appologise, as I havent seen it asked.)

 

[Timo]

Why would they want to cloak?

I mean, they do have the means to stay invisible when they don't want to be seen. The Hansens in "Dark Frontier" had great difficulty in locating a Borg Cube and indeed proving its existence. But whenever we the audience see the Borg, they are in a situation where they want to be seen: offering the joys of assimilation to unreceptive and ignorant mortals.

A somewhat more curious question is why the Borg Drones do not utilize beam weapons, or indeed any ranged weapons (besides transporters that bring them right next to the target). Now those would seem to have utility value in all circumstances.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Cloaks aren't practical for every kind of ship. They've always been shown to be power-intensive devices, while at the same time requiring their ships to keep their energy emissions to a minimum to make them easier for the cloak to block. Obviously that can quickly reach a point of diminishing returns -- the more power you generate, the more power you need to cloak it. So cloaks are only practical for bare-bones vessels designed to accommodate them, ships that don't use too much power. Which is why Starfleet ships don't generally use them -- because with the exception of the Defiant class, Starfleet vessels are not bare-bones warships or spy ships, but are multipurpose explorer ships.

Now, the Borg are theoretically all about efficiency, so you'd think they wouldn't give off too much excess power (although if they really cared about efficiency, their ships would be spheres, the most efficient arrangement of volume, rather than those silly cubes). But their ships are very big, so they'd be very hard to cloak.

Anyway, why would they want or need to cloak? Except for Species 8472, they've virtually never encountered an enemy that could match their power. Who would they need to hide from?

 

[Locutus of Board]

So, you simply wipe them from a command prompt and program them to be benevolent?

 

[Timo]

[Cloaks]'ve always been shown to be power-intensive devices

Have they?

The prototype Romulan cloakship was running low on fuel at one point of her mission, but that's about it. The devices we see (or don't see) are portable and can apparently be hooked to any sort of power socket ("Enterprise Incident", "Profit and Loss", "Emperor's New Cloak"); in absence of one, they can cloak themselves on internal power only ("Emperor's New Cloak"). The cloak installed on the Defiant was never said to be a major power drain, nor did the Klingons or Romulans complain of such things after that single "Balance of Terror" incident.

The idea of designing ships to be compatible with cloaks is a sound one, though. One does have to choose the kind of desing where assorted emissions are either minimized or then concentrated for easy concealment. Klingons might have designed their 23rd century BoPs with cloaking as a primary criterion; they might also have designed their cruisers with such things in mind, although ENT "Unexpected" suggests that Klingons didn't have cloaking before they designed their main cruiser lineages. Probably cloaks are still worth the while on unoptimal ships, but serious cloak-and-dagger work is best carried out with custom designs - hence Kirk and pals jumping to the conclusion of "Klingon Bird of Prey!" in both ST3 and ST6, despite the very real possibility of other Klingon ship types being capable of cloaking as well.

The Borg do not believe much in customizing, that much is certain. Their hyper-generic designs might indeed be a hindrance in achieving optimal invisibility. Then again, they are a secretive bunch... So perhaps low emissions, low sensor albedo and other stuff of that nature are chief criteria in the construction of Borg vessels already, and visual invisibility is just a meaningless optional extra that doesn't hold much attraction to the Collective?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[nx1701g]

My question is this (simply): why would they even care to cloak? We've seen that you require massive fleets to even take down one cube so what would be the logic in cloaking at any rate? I could understand attempting to sneak in and assimilate - but that's what the Transwarp was for.

 

[tharpdevenport]

After voyager, I think it's easier to say they don't need a cloaking device. Best I recall, only one race managed to slip threw their hands, and only Species 8472 were the only ones to do harmable battle.

Everyone else was taken regardless of seeing them coming. Would you cloak a nuclear bomb?