Why was Starfleet so slow to acknowledge the Borg threat?

It's also something that insects do. The 'hive' might send in a single Ant to probe around in a kitchen, and then a while later all his buddies start to come along too. And as we know, the Borg's behaviour was (originally) based on the behaviour of insects, specifically those hive mind species like Ants or Bees.

Agreed, BillJ. There's very little ambiguity there, the Lakul was apparently escaping from the Borg cataclysm. It's sort of a continuity error, but it was probably an intentional one, for dramatic purposes.

 

That's possible. The initial Borg surveillance team i.e. Rangers are leaving a formic acid trail. Maybe they do a honey location dance too.

It was probably in the deleted scenes. Maybe it will show up in the Grand Anniversary DVD edition.

 

Robbiesan - the use of hotlinked images is prohibited on this board. You may use images hosted on your own site, or from your own space on an image hosting site such as Photobucket, etc.

Please don't do this again.

 

Guinan said she encountered the Borg a century ago when their world was destroyed, and in Generations they were refugees of that assimilation.

 

Concise summary! Both the Federation and the Romulans had suffered (unseen) casualties by Borg by the time of "The Neutral Zone".

The Borg had been there, but found nothing of interest of these technologically "inferior" species and left.

That apparently changed with "Q Who" when Q moved the Enterprise-D much further than it could have possibly went on her own - and thus attracted the Borg to the enigmatic and technologically superior "Q Drive".

Guinan: "My people encountered them a century ago. They destroyed our cities, they scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They're called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you."

Guinan arrived near Earth following this scattering during ST VII.
So why didn't she give the Federation an advance warning?

My 0.02 $ are

• she had already tried to do this with her own people (after what she had learned from Picard during their time together in the cavern in "Time's Arrow" - this is a conjectural pet theory of mine), but nobody would listen so based on her experience neither would the Federation
• she was afraid that some curious human scientists would try to find and investigate this unknown race (which would bring Earth and the Alpha Quadrant to unnecessary and premature Borg attention)

Bob

 

It's possible that Q Who was the first true contact the UFP had.

Cochrane may have got scoffed for saying some humans, a human/Betazoid hybrid, an android and a Klingon saved his warp flight (lol..) but then I'd bet his contemporaries would have said it was the drink talking and not him. As for Archer, well the Borg didn't say who they were, and he and Starfleet probably thought "who the f**king hell were they?!" I'd doubt in Kirk's time it was public knowledge, though Section 31 of that era plus classified and most likely forgotten details in Starfleet may have existed.

As for why the UFP in Picard's day didn't do anything, they most likely underestimated the threat, or couldn't determine when the Borg would come.

 

Which did happen. We see the Hansens' in "Dark Frontier" (Star Trek: Voyager) chasing the Borg years before the Enterprise encounter in "Q, Who?"

 

This is exactly what happened, but Cochrane ended up retracting his statement. Episode "Enterprise: Regeneration."