Except for when they, you know, went back in time and assimilated Earth.
Do you think Riker's last ditch ramming work in BOBW?
- Thread starter ConRefit79
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It was for morale. A soldier's death for his crew. Quick and painless (relative to assimilation) for the civilians on board. Riker knew they couldn't stop them. But yeah, they kind of showed in Emissary that wouldn't have worked. They'd have stopped the ship dead and transported 1000 drones to begin First Contact style close-up and personal assimilation
I think the ramming attempt would have failed spectacularly.
It's really hard for the mind to stay out of the toilet when you read "Riker" and "ramming" in the same sentence.
It would probably depend upon how much inertia a ship at warp has and if the Borg ever encountered it before. Given that people are able to simply punch and stab Borg with reckless abandon and it work every time, perhaps the better option would be to replicate large rocks and fire those at as high speeds as possible. The Borg have repeatedly shown themselves to be quick at adapting to energy weapons but slow to the point to inept at adapting to physical threats at least on an "individual" level. I guess that would be less dramatic though, "Ensign, start replicating rocks and a really giant slingshot!!!"
There never are when it comes to saving Earth. None in TMP. None in TVH( I know the probe disabled them). None in the Xinidi Spheres attacked. But funny enough, when NX-01 returned home, there were plenty to greet them.
Riker had thought of it - so, of course, it was going to work!
It might have worked, depending on who wrote the theoretical script where Riker actually went through with it. Trek has plenty of precedents on this type of thing.
From his last transmission, it didn't look like the overconfident Admiral Hanson had time to order any suicide attacks before he was killed/assimilated.
Riker ordered Crusher to ram at warp speed. Given the close proximity of the Borg, he could have intended to employ the Picard Maneuver, executing a short warp jump that targeted the center of the cube. The explosion from the Enterprise's breached warp core would be tremendous, it could have disabled the Borg Cube long enough for Starfleet reinforcements to arrive. At J-25 the Enterprise's phasers damaged the Cube enough to shut it down temporarily and put the Borg into repair mode. Data said the dimensions of the BOBW cube matched the J-25 vessel, so it wasn't more massive.
An antimatter explosion that large would be tough to "adapt" to or defend against, that's why it's one of Star Trek's trump cards. They wheel out antimatter explosive devices to waste everything from the gaseous entity in Obsession to the giant space Amoeba in the Immunity Syndrome. Look at how Kirk was able to put the Doomsday Machine out of commission by ramming the Constellation into it. The USS Kelvin was able to cripple the much larger Narada the same way.
Based on precedents like those, I think it could have worked.... if the writers had wanted it to.
From his last transmission, it didn't look like the overconfident Admiral Hanson had time to order any suicide attacks before he was killed/assimilated.
Riker ordered Crusher to ram at warp speed. Given the close proximity of the Borg, he could have intended to employ the Picard Maneuver, executing a short warp jump that targeted the center of the cube. The explosion from the Enterprise's breached warp core would be tremendous, it could have disabled the Borg Cube long enough for Starfleet reinforcements to arrive. At J-25 the Enterprise's phasers damaged the Cube enough to shut it down temporarily and put the Borg into repair mode. Data said the dimensions of the BOBW cube matched the J-25 vessel, so it wasn't more massive.
An antimatter explosion that large would be tough to "adapt" to or defend against, that's why it's one of Star Trek's trump cards. They wheel out antimatter explosive devices to waste everything from the gaseous entity in Obsession to the giant space Amoeba in the Immunity Syndrome. Look at how Kirk was able to put the Doomsday Machine out of commission by ramming the Constellation into it. The USS Kelvin was able to cripple the much larger Narada the same way.
Based on precedents like those, I think it could have worked.... if the writers had wanted it to.
thinking about the first meeting with borg:
that cubo was 1500/3000 meters high, so it had the volume of 1200/4800 galaxy class ships. And Ent-D almost destroys it.
It's incredible. Maybe borg are not as advanced as we think
that cubo was 1500/3000 meters high, so it had the volume of 1200/4800 galaxy class ships. And Ent-D almost destroys it.
It's incredible. Maybe borg are not as advanced as we think
It wouldn't have destroyed the cube, but it might have done enough damage to it to make it stop and regenerate, giving a few more humans a chance to run away.
They were all wiped out at Wolf 359
There was the Mars defense perimeter. Oh, wait. Never mind
Yes, that was my point...
I think 1 cube could be cabable of assimilating the entire Earth if given the opportunity. First, beam down to a place with little people, assimilate them and you've perhaps doubled in strength... At the time there wasn't much to fight Borg drones, so... I think 1 cube could do it.
Maybe the Borg could be able to release some nanoprobes into the atmosphere, when you inhale, you're basically assimilated... They wouldn't even have to go down to the planet.
Slingshot time travel back a few centuries, give yourself time to study your Borg scans, come up with a defense. Not now, Madeline!
...So beaming down to a place with normal-sized people would quadruple your strength?
There's no telling what really happened to Earth in the first round of ST:FC. It got assimilated by the 2370s, but by whom? A single Sphere, or five dozen Cubes?
In any case, the ending of ST:FC must amount to a Borg victory, or else the Borg would simply have used time travel again until they won. So having Earth get assimilated is part of the definition of Borg defeat and thus appears to have been but a ruse to lure Picard to the past, where his valiant crew would build a warp vessel for a local hillbilly and jumpstart the Federation so that it could grow to be assimilated in the future, or whatever. So, no threat of Earth assimilation in ST:FC, either...
Timo Saloniemi
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