The Borg Aren't Too Clever

[All Seeing Eye]

Why don't Borg ships utilise fully covered hull armour on all their ships? and why don't they utilise hull tight shielding?

I mean come on, I understand they can regenerate damage and repair damage during even battle but why expel so much energy on repairing when instead you could have a full protective shield?

Also why don't Borg drones just activate personal shields immediately? why do they allow themselves to be shot so many times? any energy shield should protect them straight away and then they can adapt it further when shot at.

Why don't Borg drones have energy weapons in their arms? they always seem to fight physically which never sat right for me. Even if they just had a stun weapon in their arms, they could stun someone and then inject them whilst they're down and stunned.

Why do the Borg rely on injection tubules? even with today's tech we can shoot darts at animals or people and inject tranquillisers into their bodies so why don't the Borg utilise something similar? they could shoot their victims from a distance.

I believe if all these problems with the Borg were rectified we could have a Borg 'come back' and they could once again be the evil menacing unstoppable force they used to be and a real threat to the Federation.

 

[DonIago]

Perhaps they don't do these things because they never needed to in order to accomplish their goals.

When their usual tactics don't work, they adapt and try again.

 

[Deks]

It's also possible that these precautionary measures are not implemented for the sole purpose of luring their adversaries into revealing what they can do.
Once they do, the Borg adapt to their methods and proceed with assimilation.

 

[Wingsley]

RE: HULL ARMOR

If you will recall the final combat scene from "Q Who", the Borg very quickly adapted to Picard's tactics, successfully deflecting barages of phasers and photon torpedoes. And in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II", a single Borg ship managed to beat back the combined assault of 40 starships without much problem, plus they adapted their shields to block Transporter beams directly between the Enterprise-D and the Borg ship's interior. So the Borg appear to have energy-based shields superior to any armor plating.

RE: DRONE SHIELDS

You forget one fundamental aspect of Borg combat and technology. The Borg are accustomed to using their drones as cannon fodder because soldiers that have absoloutely no individual personality or distinctive characteristics worth mentioning are totally disposable. So throwing a few drones at a newly encountered race is probably seen as a good thing to them; if the new race uses a new weapon on the "sacrifice" drones, their damage/deaths will provide the mothership with the opportunity to analyze and adapt to any new weapons technology.

Bottom line: the Borg do not value cleverness; it's contrary to their nature. They prefer to "get hit" so they can send more drones that will be adapted to deflect the next punch.

RE: LACK OF DRONE SIDEARMS

Sidearms are also contrary to the Borg nature. The Borg do not want to kill or injure an attacking alien. They will more likely want to assimilate the alien. The alien becomes more valuable to the collective alive and intact as a drone than injured or dead.

RE: BORG PREFERENCE FOR INJECTION TUBULES OVER OTHER DELIVERY MEANS

We saw in the "First Contact" movie that the Borg find direct touch to be useful in stunning, incapacitating, assimilating and ultimately controlling their victims. Also consider the funamantal nature of the Borg: they are an amalgamation of biological and artificial life, and rather than procreating they prefer to expand their numbers through assimilation. So instead of sex, they inject tubules into new victims to perpetuate their numbers. Since they imbed their technology in their bodies to begin with, why wouldn't they prefer direct touch over other delivery methods? That's like telling a newlywed couple to skip the honeymoon and have a baby through artificial insemination. Not natural.




Having said all of this, I'm not wild about what Berman & Co. did with the Borg. They overused the concept, and in my opinion they mishandled it in the process. The Borg could have been evolved quite differently in fewer stories if Berman & Co. had been more patient and clever. I see the Borg as a serious threat to security, but not as full-time bad guys. By giving them a kind of "bad guy personality", Berman and Co. started the downhill slide from the second encounter. ("The Best of Both Worlds") So it wasn't the Borg who should be criticized, it was TNG's creative leadership.

 

[Verteron]

I do agree with many of your points. You'd think drones could have stun weapons, ferchrissake. I mean, they must've conquererd thousands of races that have this technology before, and it's not like it'd prevent assimilation. Remember also that assimilation tubules were a new thing for the Borg in First Contact, by which point they were already being dumbed down.

Honestly, you'd think a hive mind with all the resources it has as its disposal would be really smart, knowing your next step and coming up with a countermeasure even before you know yourself.

The problem was that the Q-Who Borg were basically this and basically invincible, and invincible enemies don't make for good television (not Star Trek, anyway).

 

[Elias Vaughn]

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not huge on Voyager knowledge), but weren't most Delta Quadrant races pretty technologically inferior when compared to the Federation? The Borg probably just never learned the tactics necessary to fight someone as advanced as the Federation.

 

[Unicron]

Some of them were, while others were reasonably equal or even superior (the Voth come to mind, and Arturis' species seemed to have some technological advantages before the Borg hit them).

 

[Timo]

Also, we have no reason to believe that humans or the UFP were the first adversaries the Borg met in the Alpha Quadrant - or that the Borg entered Alpha particularly recently. Originally, two witnesses (to wit, the frequently lying bartender of the E-D and the God of Lies ) stated that the Borg were hundreds of millennia old. Later on, it was learned that they had pretty low Species numbers for several Alpha Quadrant species, lower than the numbers for many Delta Quadrant ones. And finally, it was learned that the Borg are actually secretive and prefer to monitor primitive cultures unnoticed, until striking when the cultures are "ripe" - so them being taken by surprise sounds unlikely.

Remember also that assimilation tubules were a new thing for the Borg in First Contact, by which point they were already being dumbed down.

Nothing in ST:FC suggested that the tubules would have been a new thing (apart from, well, them being a new thing from Paramount's or the audience's point of view). No Borg Drones attempted to assimilate our heroes in the TNG episodes that preceded that movie, so we have no way of knowing if they would have used tubules or not. An injection that caused skin color change was used on Picard in "Best of Both Worlds", though.

OTOH, the Borg aren't really hunters. They assimilate people if those people try to interfere with Borg operations. But they don't normally wander in search of victims like zombies. If everybody just ran away from them, there would be no assimilees, and both sides would be happy. Save for, of course, the running party losing their ground, their ship, or whatever they hold dear and don't want the Drones trampling over.

If the Borg hunt, like they hunted for Picard, they do not need to run. They can transport right next to their victim instead, like they did with Picard. No real need for ranged weapons, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FordSVT]

I do agree with many of your points. You'd think drones could have stun weapons, ferchrissake. I mean, they must've conquererd thousands of races that have this technology before, and it's not like it'd prevent assimilation.

The Borg kill, and the Borg capture for assimilation. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground. It's much easier to transport your victims on foot during the assimilation process if they're not unconscious, so using stun weapons would be counter-productive in that case.

 

[Meredith]

I always assumed the borg change from TNG to TNG Movies and voyager was due to their assimilation of some technologically superior species....

Also what did Janeway and Co. take in "Unimatrix Zero" to resist the hive mind so they could maintain their individuality after being assimilated?

That sounds more like the ultimate Borg weapon.

 

[Deks]

What Janeway and her away team had, was a neural suppressant injected to prevent interaction with cybernetic implants that protected their higher brain functions from being enslaved by the Collective.

It was a temporary solution though, since the neural suppressant wore off quicker for Tuvok than for Janeway or Torres ... quite possibly due to the differences in neurophysiology and a lot of other factors (likely the interaction of Borg nanoprobes on a Vulcan).

I agree it can be used as a protective measure against Assimilation though ... but I think the Borg learned of this trick and adapted.
Or at the very least, they were exposed to it, and probably worked on a way to circumvent it.
The doctor would likely have to devise a new defensive measure based on a similar procedure.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I mean come on, I understand they can regenerate damage and repair damage during even battle but why expel so much energy on repairing when instead you could have a full protective shield?

Reverse logic: why expel so much energy deflecting enemy fire when you can just shut down the damaged sectors and reconfigure the rest of the ship to adapt to those weapons?

Also why don't Borg drones just activate personal shields immediately?

I doubt all of them even have shields. The Borg probably equip a few of the "tough guys" with shields and then send them into battle after it becomes clear they're up against someone armed with powerful weapons. Different drones for different bones.

Why don't Borg drones have energy weapons in their arms?

For what purpose? Any Borg that are worth anything in a fight are impervious to enemy fire. They can just slice pieces out of you with a knife and save your organs for later.

Why do the Borg rely on injection tubules?

Until the garbage that passed for the Borg from First Contact on, they didn't. As Hugh put it once, the Borg assimilate civilizations, not individuals.

Since I'm inclined to ignore the more absurd Queenified incarnations of the Borg, I doubt the Borg actually assimilate anyone into the collective. "Your culture will adapt to service us" probably means nothing more complicated than "You will provide us with fuel and spare parts whenever we ask for them or we will take them by force."

 

[Unicron]

And yet Hugh also feared staying on the Enterprise, because he thought the Collective might come looking for him. He wasn't exactly consistent for plot reasons.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And yet Hugh also feared staying on the Enterprise, because he thought the Collective might come looking for him. He wasn't exactly consistent for plot reasons.

That seems consistent to me. If the Borg noticed that one of their drones was hanging out on board a big powerful starship chock full of advanced technology, it might wet their appetites a bit; his ship would identify Enterprise as something to consume.

I make this point often, but since the point of this thread seems to be "bringing back" the Borg in a non-pussy configuration, I think we should turn them back into what they were implied to be in Q Who: ineffable, unstopable, basically indestructible predators who simply decide you have something you want and then come and take it. They wouldn't be a threat race as much as a growing hazard/menace to the Federation: some outposts occasionally vanish as Borg cubes digest them for parts and dissect the survivors for organ replacements. A starship might occasionally cross paths with one of their ships, said cube might get "hungry" and chase that starship down, grab it in a tractor beam, tear it apart to extract some vital components they might need. Add to the Borg a highly inefficient and fuel-hungry power system as an excuse to have them constantly bullying less-advanced planets into manufacturing fuel for them:
"You have thirty days to manufacture five hundred tons of Trellium-D. You will transport the required materials aboard our ship upon our arrival. If you do not meet the deadline you will be punished. Resistance is futile."

 

[Unicron]

I'm kind of mixed on that view myself, because I think the Borg would get old quickly. You can't have them be too direct or the heroes lose by default, nor can you just have them occasionally make a big action. I do think having some decent stories focusing on their "vampiric" nature is good, if they're written properly (as TNG and VOY both managed to do).

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ More or less agreed. Not "Vampiric" in that sense, but more in the sense that the Borg are a race of assholes who have no concept of property, territory or privacy; fortunately, they also have no concept of war, so when they decide to come after you it's usually for some casual need of theirs, like they discovered your planet has an abundance of platinum which one particular ship just happens to need.

Storylines based on "The Borg Threat" would indeed get old fast and would result on slowly castrating the Borg to make them manageable. But storylines based on "A Borg Threat" could be cast any number of ways, especially if surviving a conflict with a particular Borg is a matter of outwitting/outrunning/disabling/sabotaging the specific cube that's creating the trouble. In that case, they're the perfect villains: extremely powerful, extremely dangerous, extremely evil, and totally disinclined to call for reinforcements or to take anything personally.

 

[FordSVT]

They should have kept the galaxy large and they should have kept the Borg just beyond arm's reach, tens of thousands of light years away. They could have been a future, lingering threat. Every once in a while, a single cube could have been sent our way through extraordinary means that the protagonists had to deal with. They could have kept the transwarp tunnel idea but made it limited and difficult to accomplish instead of the de facto way the Borg got around.

I like a lot of Borg stories, even some of the Voyager ones, but let's face it: given their supposed technological and numerical superiority, if they really wanted to conquer the Federation it would be over the week it began. It requires one to make up back-stories like "they're farming the Feds for technology and waiting", even though there isn't any direct evidence for it. The Federation certainly has a level of technology now that is in advance of many worlds we've seen them assimilate, and it would be rather foolish to wait until the Federation is so advanced that we cannot be assimilated efficiently or at all.

 

[Timo]

It requires one to make up back-stories like "they're farming the Feds for technology and waiting", even though there isn't any direct evidence for it.

Well, there's an entire VOY episode on that issue... Although on a slightly smaller scale. But the Borg never were described as innovative, so what works on the smaller scale of "Child's Play" could be what they are doing on the galactic scale.

The Federation certainly has a level of technology now that is in advance of many worlds we've seen them assimilate, and it would be rather foolish to wait until the Federation is so advanced that we cannot be assimilated efficiently or at all.

Arturis' folks seemed to have tech slightly superior to that of the Federation in "Hope and Fear", and they were rather simply defeated by sending in a dozen Cubes instead of just one. I don't see any "threshold" approaching on the UFP's ability to resist the Borg, not quite yet.

Heck, the Borg don't seem to act against the Dominion yet, either - and the Dominion can whup UFP ass any day, even with a small beachhead force stranded half a galaxy away from its support bases.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Arturis race was attractive to the Borg likely due to the Slipstream and their ability for particle synthesis.
The Federation was originally behind in those concepts (of course not so much after Voyager returned) but in terms of weapons and defensive systems, it's possible they were roughly on par.

Sending hundreds of cubes to Arturis home system seems nothing more than a precautionary measure to ensure victory ... that and the fact that they were already in the DQ, relatively close to the Borg.

The Federation seems like a nice playing field for assimilating new technologies.
It's one of the better reasons to explain the Borg invasion of Federation space by sending only a cube at a time instead of dozens.

Also, to be frank ... the Dominion was sending hundreds of ships initially into the AQ and had a foothold there. They also had assistance from the Cardassians, and later on from the Breen.
We do not know the state of the Dominion in the GQ for example ... because they just might have exhausted most of their supplies of troops and ships in the war ... however the only difference is that their infrastructure in the GQ was intact, whereas the Feds likely suffered some damage in this retrospect on their home turf.

 

[Timo]

...Moreover, the Dominion infrastructure in Alpha was repeatedly attacked, and the Alphans thought they had struck devastating blows against Dominion shipbuilding. Yet the Dominion kept out-building the UFP, the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire put together, with these bombed-out, beachhead force carry-along facilities squatting on the turf of a sixth-rate local empire!

Just install the same porta-factories on some Dominion world in Gamma, and there's no threat of exhaustion. In that sense, the Dominion is roughly in the same league as the Borg: nothing short of total destruction will stop them in conventional war. Their learning curve is probably much shallower, though, and they are less likely to adapt to unconventional tricks or attacks directly against their centralized leadership. So the Borg shouldn't have that much trouble dealing with them...

Timo Saloniemi