Picture the Novelverse - Characters, Ships and More !

[F. King Daniel]

I dunno, I think it was more about recognizing that the Borg sphere crashing on 2063 Earth in First Contact was a story hook just lying there waiting to be picked up on. Though you'd have more of a case if you said that about the Ferengi episode.

It didnt crash at all, that's a retcon. In First Contact, it quite clearly exploded

 

[Enterprise1701]

It didnt crash at all, that's a retcon. In First Contact, it quite clearly exploded

Yes, but unlike in "The Best of Both Worlds", they now had enough of a VFX budget to show large distinctive pieces breaking off.

 

[Christopher]

It didnt crash at all, that's a retcon. In First Contact, it quite clearly exploded

Yes, it exploded in orbit, so naturally the debris would eventually crash to Earth, because that's what happens to orbital debris. It's not a retcon, any more than it's a retcon to reveal someone's gravestone after they died in an earlier story. It's just the natural consequence.

 

[Stevil2001]

Borg Rubik's Cube

âï¸ Fusion Cube

15 seconds · Clipped by Markonian · Original video "Destroy the Fusion Cube at all cost" by Paratrooper84

youtube.com

As someone who read The Return at a young age (probably even before I saw "Best of Both Worlds," now that I think about it), I've always taken it for granted that Borg ships are cube shaped so that they can combine (and the reason that they have redundant systems is because they are all made up of even more combined cubes).

 

[Tuskin38]

the Fusion cube first showed up in the video game Armada II from 2002, which is what Star Trek Online was referencing when they used it.

 

[XCV330]

, because that's what happens to orbital debris.

No. It's not, always. Not every piece of orbital debris is a chunk of skylab waiting to kiss the dirt of Australia.

A few things: it's difficult to judge entirely from visual cues but the sphere is not in low earth orbit. It might not be in geo-sync but it's somewhere in between in a medium/Van Allen belt orbit. Debris at that altitude can take centuries to degrade to the point it reenters due to a lack of atmospheric drag. Some of the explosive ejecta would have gone even higher, some would have probably went out of earth orbit altogether and maybe even out of solar orbit. As I said, it's hard to judge from visual clues.

In fairness some of the ejecta would have went retrograde and had enough delta-v to transfer into a polar orbit (I assume as Star Trek almost never shows anything in a polar orbit) and fall towards Antarctica, as Ent shows. But anything large enough to have maintained intact humanoid sized beings would have been easily (and necessarily) tracked by Enterprise (or for that matter by anything left operating by the United States and other remaining nations. But whether NORAD or some equivalent still existed to pay attention, Enterprise certainly would have seen them. Maintaining the timeline does seem to have been kind of important to the plot. Anything too small to track would have burned up in reentry.

So yes, Regeneration was a particularly dumb episode. It just happened to be wedged into a particularly bad season so its awfulness sometimes doesn't get noticed.