Spaceborn Virus, via Icheb. Neonates on Cube weren't affected, no telling if the Borg’s immunity worked, or if in any way, this Virus was transmitted to other Cubes?
The Icheb story arc would seem to suggest that such viral attacks are a known threat to the Borg, and that they have adapted to it by adopting this isolation protocol: an infested Borg unit (typically a ship) is ordered to self-destruct, and if that fails, destroyed - and if that fails, not communicated with.
We see in several other episodes that the Collective ruthlessly destroys parts of itself to stop infections. And it's rather nicely buffered for such a thing, given how many trillions of Drones there are. So I'd assume all these virus attacks are stopped eventually, although not always at the first ship infected.
Hugh’s Psychological Impact: Took out a few of them, but, what/how many other did it effect ?
Might also be that the isolation protocols treated Hugh's effects as a viral attack and isolated his ship (or, it seems, the small ship that came to recover Hugh, and then some larger mothership, to explain the large numbers of Drones affected and later adopted by Lore).
Janeway’s Destruction of the Nexus: How many Ships were destroyed, how many left, are the Transwarp Conduits still “marginally” operative, those or Nexus being rebuilt?
It seems there were at least six of those hub things (that Seven knew about), and Janeway was only shown destroying one, plus parts of a major Borg habitat. So again there'd seem to be robustness in the system, enough to allow the Collective to adapt.
The loss of that one particular hub didn't seem to collapse the conduit that took Janeway to Earth in the belly of that Borg Sphere. At least not immediately, that is. We might speculate that the transwarp conduits are short-lived, and that they need to be renewed with transwarp coils or then kept more permanently open with those nodes - but we also know new conduits can be created with the help of a transwarp coil, after which even coil-less ships can utilize them for a while. So in no case would the Borg be completely deprived of their fast lanes. Although it does seem that different conduits allow for different speeds, and that the ones created by the hubs are amongst the very fastest.
Wolf 359, Ok, they got destroyed, but, is the ingenuity of their Escape Pod transferring, specific to a Queen as in 2063, or ?
Odds are that the Cube that slaughtered the fleet at Wolf 359 initiated the conversion of at least a few of those wrecks (or possible intact-captured ships) into new Borg vessels, ENT "Regeneration" style. All sorts of Wolf 359 captives could have left the original Cube at that point aboard those new ships, then. It's possible the Queen physically left at that point, too; but it's also possible that the Queen physically stayed aboard the Cube all the way to Earth, and then was blown up there.
But since the Queen's body seems to be manufactured of standard parts anyway (alternating between the likenesses of Susanna Thompson and Alice Krige), it seems natural to assume that the loss of one body would be no big loss to the Queen. For all we know, she inhabits hundreds or millions of bodies simultaneously anyway, in various different locations across the Collective's realm, and either doesn't much mind losing one copy, or then can withdraw her essence from the body at the moment of its death and move along the aphysical Collective to a safer physical location. Or perhaps stay aphysical for a while, for that matter.
The Species 8472 attack appeared to hurt the Collective physically, although it never seemed to be a threat to the aphysical aspects of being Borg. Perhaps Borg behavior was at least temporarily affected by the physical damage - possibly triggering a re-escalation program that involved e.g. the mass assimilations of cultures in "Hope and Fear" and "Dark Frontier".
Why not? 11,000 people divided by 40 starships is only 275 crewmembers per ship (they probably weren't divided exactly that way, but it doesn't matter). That's very reasonable for the amount of Starfleet dead.
One wonders how many of those 11,000 were really killed in the battle, and how many lost to assimilation...
Also, one wonders how many ships were "really" lost. Does the 39 refer to ships whose total destruction was documented, or to ships that weren't around as the battle ended, having been assimilated? Or did Starfleet perhaps lose 45 ships but managed to rebuild six of them (considering how most of the wrecks we saw were nearly intact physically, and how the
Ahwahnee was later reported as being active again in "Redemption")?
Timo Saloniemi
