How long was Seven in a maturation chamber for?

[The Borg Queen]

In Drone, Torres comments that One went from infant to child in a single day, and Seven states that the drone's maturation rate was 25x that of a conventional Borg, and One reaches full maturation within a week.

If that's still 25 times faster than "normal", Seven of Nine shouldn't have spent more than six months in a maturation chamber, so why do people commonly assume that she spent about a dozen years in a maturation chamber?

 

[JNG]

^

Well, look at her...she's so ripe.

 

[VulcanGuy]

^

Well, look at her...she's so ripe.

Yep. The Collective realised human female perfection when they found Seven.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The inconsistency of the writing?

When the kid with the virus got sent back to his family, Janeway said that the kid looked a little older but recognizable. or words to that effect.

Meanwhile in Drone...

SEVEN: This technology resembles a Borg maturation chamber, but many of the components are unfamiliar.

JANEWAY: Using his genetic code as a template to create a lifeform.
TUVOK: The drone has increased in mass by seventeen percent.
SEVEN: its maturation rate is twenty five times that of a conventional Borg.

Seven was saying that One was growing 25 times faster than a regular Borg in a regular maturation chamber, not 25 times faster than than a regular person/borg outside a maturation chamber and that 25 times faster was very unusual.

It's 29th century tech bud.

 

[Toban Kal]

If they took her when she was 6 and have to wait until the normal amount of time passes for her grow up then she would have to wait at least another 10 years.
But I think the borg would use something to speed up the ageing of their drones from children to adults. After all it's not very efficient to have cubes full of children just sitting around doing nothing until they hit their teens.

If One matured from fetus to adult 25 times faster and his grown only took hours we can reason that the process usually takes a couple of days, perhaps a couple of weeks, to go from baby to adult.
Since she wasn't a baby when she went in I'd say Seven probably only spent a week or so in the maturation chamber before coming out as an 16-18 year old drone.

 

[Toban Kal]

according to memory alpha a borg drone spends about 17 cycles in the maturation chamber.
Now all we have to do is figure out what a cycle is.
Hours? days? weeks? months?
I doubt years.

 

[KiraDax]

according to memory alpha a borg drone spends about 17 cycles in the maturation chamber.
Now all we have to do is figure out what a cycle is.

Regeneration cycle?

How long did Seven typically regenerate for? 8-10 hours, pretty much like a sleep cycle?

So yeah, couple of weeks and the baby Borg were big Borg.

 

[Timo]

according to memory alpha a borg drone spends about 17 cycles in the maturation chamber.

But that supposes that the Borg regularly raise Drones all the way from infant to adult in their maturation chambers. This is not what Seven says in any of the episodes. Few Drones would probably be assimilated as infants, and no infants appear to be born to the Borg unless perhaps from pregnant females assimilated just before giving birth.

Also, Seven speaks of a rate of maturation at a certain stage of the process. Doesn't mean that the rate would be constant through the process. Perhaps it takes a year or two to raise a six-year-old to a twentysomething, but the rate of bodily growth and maturation is high for very young assimilees, and then slows down for older recent assimilees, or for assimilees who have aged thanks to the process.

So basically, the writers can be as inconsistent as they wish, and still not contradict anything said.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Fact of a matter is, writers are responsible for the inconsistencies.
But, if we go with the premise that 1 cycle is identical for all drones (time-wise) and that it only depends on how many cycles a drone spends in a maturation chamber (which again depends on age of the assimilated individual).

 

[Guy Gardener]

The Borg might not be in a rush.

The Borg are never in a rush.

 

[Toban Kal]

The Borg might not be in a rush.

The Borg are never in a rush.

True they are a patient lot but they are always going on about perfection and efficiency and waiting a lifetime for a drone to grow up doesn't strike me as terribly efficient.

 

[teya]

In "Collective," Seven said:

"When I was first captured by the Borg . . . I was young and frightened. I watched my parents assimilated. Then I was placed in a maturation chamber, and the hive mind began to restructure my synaptic pathways--purge my individuality. When I emerged five years later, the turmoil of my forced assimilation had been replaced with order."

The answer to the OP's question is: 5 years.

As for consistency? This is Voyager. It's never consistent.

 

[VulcanGuy]

In "Collective," Seven said:

"When I was first captured by the Borg . . . I was young and frightened. I watched my parents assimilated. Then I was placed in a maturation chamber, and the hive mind began to restructure my synaptic pathways--purge my individuality. When I emerged five years later, the turmoil of my forced assimilation had been replaced with order."

The answer to the OP's question is: 5 years.

As for consistency? This is Voyager. It's never consistent.

We're never told if that's the case for all drones or not. Other issues might come up that prevent a drone from maturing at the normal rate. Energy shortages, enemy attacks etc.

I'm sure the maturation process was a second priority when Species 8472 began their attack.

 

[Deks]

In "Collective," Seven said:

"When I was first captured by the Borg . . . I was young and frightened. I watched my parents assimilated. Then I was placed in a maturation chamber, and the hive mind began to restructure my synaptic pathways--purge my individuality. When I emerged five years later, the turmoil of my forced assimilation had been replaced with order."

The answer to the OP's question is: 5 years.

As for consistency? This is Voyager. It's never consistent.

We're never told if that's the case for all drones or not. Other issues might come up that prevent a drone from maturing at the normal rate. Energy shortages, enemy attacks etc.

I'm sure the maturation process was a second priority when Species 8472 began their attack.

The maturation process would likely vary between species that have a different speed at which they mature as non-Borg.
For example, Naomi Wildman is a half-K'Tarian, and she was maturing twice as fast compared to a human.
It is possible that if Naomi was assimilated and placed in a maturation chamber, she would emerge from it 2.5 years later.

The nanoprobes likely increase the rate at which biological individuals mature standardly.
This factor at which the maturation process is increased would likely be the same for all species (if we go by Annika, then double, as a lot of humans reach physical maturity at the age of 16, and she spent only 5 years in a maturation chamber ... she was 11 at the time she emerged and by 5 years younger from a chronological point of view).
But it also depends at which age they were assimilated to begin with.
If Annika was assimilated at the age of 8 instead of 6, she would likely emerge from the maturation chamber earlier.
If she was assimilated at the age of 4, she might have been longer in the chamber.
And let's not forget that she was a drone for 18 years ... 13 of which were active (outside of the maturation chamber) ... meaning that there is a possibility the Borg improved the maturation process by then and even further shortened the time needed for an individual to mature.

It's in the Borg's interest to increase the speed of the maturation process so they have working drones as fast as possible, but the time for each drone spent in a maturation chamber would vary despite how you look at it as they were assimilated at various stages of their childhood and different species have different speeds at which they mature as non-Borg.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I gotta wonder about the uppermost size of a maturation chamber before the Borg just say "F*&k it." (Thinking about dinosaurs and leviathans. Smart ones, mind you.) or if a species might age so slowly that the Borg would avoid them as children (It's conceivable that Vulcans mature three times slower than humans, that a FULLBLOODED Vulcan (I suppose T'Pring and Ston were the same age as Spock and they all looked kind of the same age, but but no one tried to enforce the arranged marriage on T'Pol until she was nearly 60, however T'Pau on Enterprise was said to be 30 and the actress was way too hot to be thirty (I'm over thirty.).) in their 30s would probably look like a human teenager.

And for the other races who mature even slower than that?

 

[Odo's_Bucket]

Long enough for this to happen : http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg196/celebmonkey/JeriRyan-2.jpg

I always thought it was odd that the doctor was never able to remove all of the Borg hardware from Seven of Nine or from the Borg 'children', yet he was able to remove it all from Chakotay, Janeway and Tuvok. Very odd. Weren't any of their internal organs or tissue replaced by Borg hardware during their assimilation? If the doctor could remove theirs and repair their natural tissue, why were Seven and 'the kids' forced to keep certain implants? The same goes for Picard. He has no Borg implants left either.

 

[VulcanGuy]

I always thought it was odd that the doctor was never able to remove all of the Borg hardware from Seven of Nine or from the Borg 'children', yet he was able to remove it all from Chakotay, Janeway and Tuvok. Very odd. Weren't any of their internal organs or tissue replaced by Borg hardware during their assimilation? If the doctor could remove theirs and repair their natural tissue, why were Seven and 'the kids' forced to keep certain implants? The same goes for Picard. He has no Borg implants left either.

Seven and the kids were much younger and had been in the collective longer than Chakotay and the crew.

Since they were all so young their organic tissues may have become redundant from dormancy.

 

[Odo's_Bucket]

I always thought it was odd that the doctor was never able to remove all of the Borg hardware from Seven of Nine or from the Borg 'children', yet he was able to remove it all from Chakotay, Janeway and Tuvok. Very odd. Weren't any of their internal organs or tissue replaced by Borg hardware during their assimilation? If the doctor could remove theirs and repair their natural tissue, why were Seven and 'the kids' forced to keep certain implants? The same goes for Picard. He has no Borg implants left either.

Seven and the kids were much younger and had been in the collective longer than Chakotay and the crew.

Since they were all so young their organic tissues may have become redundant from dormancy.

It doesn't matter at what point in your life your eyeball is removed. Having it removed when you're thirty doesn't make it easier to replace. Remember the characters from the episodes 'Unity' and 'Survival Instinct' ? They were all adults when they were assimilated and they all still had implants and bodily damage after they were freed from the collective.

 

[Timo]

The same goes for Picard. He has no Borg implants left either.

I don't buy that. Beverly and the rest of UFP medical excellence must have dropped the ball there, because Picard still keeps hearing Borg voices. No doubt his body retains some amount of Borg hardware that serves as a receiver...

Remember that Bashir, a guy who does brain prosthetics at the drop of a Bajoran Vedek's silly hat, was unable to remove a macroscopic object from Garak's midbrain. It doesn't sound as if Federation medicine could be intrusive enough to remove all the stuff the Borg insert in a body, or rather, the stuff the Borg nanoprobes build inside a body.

One might well argue that the stuff deep inside gets built over a length of time, and that Picard suffered just the very earliest symptoms of that, but Seven and the kids got the full treatment while Janeway's posse got essentially just a surface job.

And surface jobs are trivially undone. Lose a leg? The Federation grows you a new one. Lose a pair of eyes? Pulaski grows you some, unless you insist on artificial ones that are better than the biological stuff. Not so with machinery stuck in your midbrain, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Odo's_Bucket]

Lose a leg? The Federation grows you a new one. Lose a pair of eyes? Pulaski grows you some, unless you insist on artificial ones that are better than the biological stuff. Not so with machinery stuck in your midbrain, though.

Timo Saloniemi

Tuvok has an artificial elbow. Nog has an artificial leg. Geordi has artificial eyes. Picard has an artificial heart. Kes had to donate a lung to Neelix.