Why did the Borg only use one cube to attack Earth?

Can we assume that the time traveling sphere has its time drive replacing its warp drive or transwarp drive, and thus can only really be used near the intended target world?

 

It doesn't make any sesne. In order for that to work, we have to go against, as I said earlier, previously established dialogue in TNG that indicated otherwise.

The entire Borg cube is redundant and has no main anything. The Borg cube can repair itself, which isn't really that necessary considering we've been told a Borg cube can sustain damage to 80% of the cube and still be operational.

Further more I'm re-watching the battle and aside from the Enterprise E entering the picture, all I see is the Defiant with its quantum torpedoes. Everybody esle appears to be firing normal torpedoes and phasers which we know not only don't cause any damage to the Borg sheilds, they don't even weaken them.


What a fucking bad movie. Every time I re-watch some portion of it, I find more wrong with it, down to even the nitpicky. This time I'm noticing many of these photon torpedoes don't sound like photon torpedoes, and neither do some of the phasers. Then I'm noticing the Enterprise comes in and the Borg imemdiately fire on it twice, yet not even five seconds later Picard is giving the order to beam the Defiant survivors aboard. Ah, by dropping the sheilds in a battle where five seconds ago you've already been hit twice? Fuck this movie so hard.

 

From a causality-standpoint, though, wasn't Cochrane's flight "always" destined to succeed, regardless of whether the Borg interfered or not? In the "original" version of history, Lily Sloane accompanied Zefram on his warp-flight, and the Enterprise-E presumably possessed historical records indicating that this is indeed what occurred, prior to the Borg attack.

It was only when the Montana missile-complex got hammered and Lily got irradiated that these plans changed, with Riker and Geordi stepping in as co-pilots. Indeed, they seemed to know exactly where to place their personnel in order to ensure a successful launch, probably as a result of knowing the "original" version of events.

(Then again, I suppose that those same records could've been overwritten by certain 21st Century individuals not long after the fact, in order to cover up the involvement of 24th Century Starfleet personnel in the affair, and keep history on its proper course...)

 

Maybe because like the federation, it was the only cube in the quadrant?

My personal theory is that for TBOBW, the one cube was sent as a recon mission of sorts, to determine the strength of the Federation, and assimilate it if possible. In most cases, one cube is probably all that is needed, but just in case more cubes are needed, the Borg don't want to tip their hand too early by sending only just enough for what they think they need, and adjust their tactics and amount of cubes they send for a follow up attack, based on how well or poorly the first cube does. Just like when they first encountered the Borg, the Enterprise-D had only one borg drone come aboard. After it was killed, the Borg sent another drone, who had better shields and capabilities, which was determined to be just enough that the Enterprise Crew couldn't neutralize it before it accomplished it's recon mission.

As for FC, I think it was a different strategy. The Borg's true mission all along was to go back in time, and assimilate Earth in the past. They did this by using the Cube as the delivery system for the sphere. They just didn't count on the Enterprise-E being caught in its wake, possibly because the E-E was technology they weren't aware of.

 

Which never made any sense to me. It seems out of character for them to use such non-linear thinking instead of just relentlessly plodding forward until they succeed. We saw in Voyager that they have thousands of cubes, and the Federation could barely fend off one. Why even bother with time travel? More importantly, if the Borg have time travel, why hasn't the whole galaxy already been retroactively assimilated? Why would they only use it once? It was an illogical plot contrivance to set up the movie. (I offered a rationalization for it in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, raising some of these very questions.)

The technology surely wasn't that radically different from previous Starfleet vessels. I think it's just the sheer unlikelihood that the E-E would happen to be in the exact right place at the exact right moment to get caught in the wake.

 

I agree, sort of. It would seem easier to just send a squadron for cubes to take out Earth, and the rest of the Federation. I'm just simply trying to come up with a possible explanation for why the Borg decided to time travel to remove an enemy as a threat, a la Terminator. As for the Enterprise-E, yes it got caught in the wake. But the E-E did have quantum torpedoes which has a much higher yield, faster and longer warp capability, as well as Picard in command, and I'm not so sure the Borg counted on the E-E being there in the first place.

 

Except the movie established that Picard could sense the Borg through their residual link. It stands to reason that the Queen could sense Picard in return, and thus the Borg would have known the E-E's movements.

 

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Seven of Nine wasn't always detectable. Nor was Janeway. Or Tuvok. Or B'Lanna. All of whom were assimilated at some point. It really comes down to the needs of the plot, and who's writing it, and why, no?

 

But the movie dialogue suggests that Locutus was different -- that the Queen wanted him to be a "counterpart," a more self-aware being than a normal drone. So he's a special case.

I just don't see why it's important for the Borg to be surprised by the Enterprise's presence. As I said, it was a massive fluke that the Enterprise happened to be in the right position to get caught in the wake. And even with the E following the sphere back, the Borg still came within a hair's breadth of succeeding in their mission. So it's not like they would've abandoned the whole plan if they'd known the E-E existed. Borg adapt to obstacles. It's what they do.

 

What First Contact was, was copious amounts of really bad writing. They should never have introduced time travel as a capability of the Borg. It makes no sense, it makes no sense how it was used, it makes no sense where it was used, and it gives the Borg far-reaching extravogent powers.


Aside from what I have already pointed out that there was no point to assimilate the human race, especially back in time when the human race had biological or technological distinctiveness worth gaining, there's also:

* Why wait until then to time travel? Why not have done it after the first failed attempt to assimilate Earth in "The Best of Both Worlds"?

* Why even let the failed attempt in "The Best of Both Worlds" to happen? We already know you can go forwards in time (that's how the Enterprise returned home), so the Borg should have already reached the collective and know of all the failed attempts. Yes, I know, the paradox, but since when have they shown they care about that?

* Why do it at Earth? They could have done this anywhere away from any Starfleet vessel, then traveled to Earth with nobody to stop them.

* Why travel back to the point of the first warp jump? What does that point in history have to possibly offer? Also, did the Vulcans not notice this at all with their sensors?

* Why not go back to the point when Q intorduced the Enterprise to the Borg? Then the Borg could arrange for that cube to have either never encountered the Enterprise, or ignored it completely, that way when the Enterprise goes back to Federation space, they'll have no advance notice and won't have any knowledge of the Borg and that way even a Borg scout ship could sweap through and assimilate Earth. The human race wouldn't stand a chance.

* Since the Borg don't seem to give a flip about temporal paradoxes, why not just go back and send the Borg sphere to preoccupy the Enterprise while the cube itself goes to Earth and takes over?

* If the Borg can now time travel, why do they ever lose? Why don't they enlist the help of Borg vessels from the future with vastly superior technology to beat every single race they encounter? Why don't future Borg just come back themselves?

Apologetic Fan: "Oh, well, you see, in the future the Borg were defeated and there are no future Borg to go back or be asked to go back. So, there!"

Me: "Ah, okay, but they weren't instantly defeated, so there are still future Borg to call back up to the date when they were finally wiped out. Also, if passed Borg can time travel, why doesn't the Queen already know they were defeated and amend her plans accordingly in advance to prevent this? Also, why doesn't she just send cube from the past to the future to quadrants with species with lesser technology and let the Borg re-build? Screw you, movie!"


And even worse, now the Federation has this time travel ability! Talk about a friggin' can of worms.

Apologetic Fan: "Yeah, but they have to figure out how to use it and that can take years!"

Me: "Ah, no, apparently they don't, as the Enterprise was able to get back to the future with no apparent trouble, plus wouldn't 7 of 9 have this time travel knowledge? Just look how easy it was to time travel with precision by sling shotting around the sun."


BAD WRITERS! Go to your rooms!

 

With regard to that last point, the easiest explanation is that the temporal vortex was more of a (ideally fairly short-lived) two-way portal, and Our Heroes just needed to figure out how to get back through it while they could. Granted this isn't explicitly supported by dialogue, but for most of the film Our Heroes have larger concerns too.

 

Well, if the Enterprise and Picard were something the Queen could track and the Enterprise wasn't a surprise, then why did the Borg allow them to destroy the cube in the first place? I mean if the Queen had some connection where she knew what Picard knew, she would have known what Picard was going to have the fleet aim at. Or better yet, why didn't they fix the weak spot in the first place? That doesn't make sense to me.

 

What do you mean, "allow?" Having some amount of intelligence about your enemy's movements does not automatically give you absolute power to dictate the outcome of a combat with them. It means you can be prepared for the encounter, but preparation does not guarantee victory, it just improves the odds.

Having an awareness of Picard does not equal being precognitive. Picard didn't think of the attack on the weak spot until he got there and sized up the situation.

You're talking as though the only two possible options are that the Borg are completely ignorant and that they have absolute, godlike infallibility. There is a huge amount of middle ground between those extremes. They don't have to be taken completely by surprise by the Enterprise-E's very existence in order to calculate that they have a reasonable chance of defeating it.

 

In my country there is a saying about putting all your chicken eggs in a basket.

We have never seen the Borg's extent in the Delta Quadrant. We do not know if they have minimum resources because they are battling a problem in their home galaxy or perhaps something they created like in the show Stargate SG-1 there are an allied aliens called Assguard that are battling spider like robots they themselves unleashed, because of this they are often unable to Brute Force the enemies of the central characcters of the show.

 

At the time in star trek canon the Borg did not have a large number of Borg vessels at their disposal and a transwarp aperture right next to Earth. That's why it took the original cube a year to reach federation space from system J25 instead of a few minutes. Plus they needed to handicap the Borg with one vessel so that the federation had a chance.

 

We have a pretty good idea of it, though, since we know that Voyager traveled more than 45,000 light years between their first encounter with the Borg in "Unity" and their last in "Endgame." That's nearly the entire width of the quadrant. And of course the Borg's territory did not exist solely along the line of Voyager's route. They didn't control the entire quadrant by a long shot, but it's clear that they must have had an extensive spread across huge portions of it. Just the initial block of Borg space they encountered in "Scorpion" and jumped over in "The Gift" was 9500 ly across -- far, far larger than the Federation. And even that was a small part of the whole.

So there's little question that the Borg's territory was more extensive than that of any other single Milky Way power known in the Trek universe.

 

Some good thoughts but I think I and everyone else are starting to think way too much about the flaws of the series and film.

 

Plot.