I could go for a Borg origin story, as long as it's good and original. And as long as it doesn't make the Borg less scary (not that that's really possible anymore).
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them." -Thomas Marrone
At the end of TMP, we obviously know the merging created somekind of noncoporial life. And V'ger knew everything in the universe, which the Q obviously possess. Which could explain why the Q are so interested in Humans and the Borg - because humanity is part of their origins.
So to assure their creation, Q alerted the Federation of the incoming Borg threat. Which eventually prevented Earth from being assimilated in the past in First Contact. And in saving the past, it allowed Kirk, Spock, and Decker to complete V'ger's journey. Thus the Q are allowed to be born.
Now with the Borg, we know they were attracted to the signal by the Borg that survived First Contact and was returning to the Collective and eventually sending the Cube that Picard encountered. But what if there was more?
For some reason the Borg are awfully determined to assimilate the Earth, inspite of their failed attempts. So there has to be something more to Earth that the Borg let on.
Maybe it has to do with V'ger? They want to go to Earth to find V'ger or the Creator, and knowing it's in the past they travel back to assimilate the Earth and wait for V'gers return in 2273 to gain pure perfection.
Blew my mind, man.
The Q connection would just be interesting, but the 'V'ger intercept' theory would explain why the Borg would even have a plan to go back in time instead of merely throwing more resources around.
I always saw the Borg Queen as bringing order to the fire....but she is also an individual and when the fire tried to burn Earth it got burn back, and now her ego and perfectionist demands she assimilate Earth.
I sort of prefer them not to have a known origin, too much mystery about the Borg has already faded and makes them less interesting overall. Saying that, I'm probably one of the few who liked them more back in "Q Who" where they were more interested in adding our 'phat lootz' to their own, than the actual meatbags that invented said loot.
I always liked the idea that maybe the El-Aurians and the Borg are actually the same deal.
Clearly the El-Aurians were a powerful species at one point, though their past has been left intentionally muddied. I could buy that at some point in the past there was some kind of schism among them in the "quest for perfection" between the purely mental (ones who searched out the Nexus) and the technological (scientists experimenting with cybernetics that became the Borg).
The El-Aurians losing control of their own creation would explain a lot of things about both pasts.
El-Aurian's natural telepathy would come in handy for building an interconnected cyborg super-brain, you'd figure.
It would also explain why most Borg look more or less human, like El-Aurians do.
Hey, I have a lot of time to think.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
I sort of prefer them not to have a known origin, too much mystery about the Borg has already faded and makes them less interesting overall. Saying that, I'm probably one of the few who liked them more back in "Q Who" where they were more interested in adding our 'phat lootz' to their own, than the actual meatbags that invented said loot.
While I enjoy a good discussion between fans on the topic of V'ger, I feel similarly with regard to a Borg origin story. I'd likely be disappointed by any final word on the mystery. I much prefer the numerous angles everyone brings to the mystery. Leave that to the novel writers. The fan fictions. Or in the case of STO, the Foundry authors. Where more than one PoV is possible.
(/\) Exploring Star Trek Online Since July 2008 (/\)
From my perception of canon, the story presented from Legacy, is useless, and IMO anyone thinking V'ger and the Borg are related, dosen't know his canon.
I am sure there are at least 50% out there who disagree, but "Dragons teeth" kinda says I am right.
Don't look silly... Don't call it the "Z-Store/Zen Store"...
In my opinion it is less about trying to connect V'Ger to the Borg as much as it is trying to answer the question of who made V'Ger and do "they" in some way have a relationship or connection to Borg.
The "machine planet" that Spock sees in the holo storage of V'Ger is what has led to all the speculation of "Borg" because we see machine planet and say - hey that looks like Borg!
But the fun may be to investigate what that machine planet really was and if it has any connection to the Borg at all.
That doesn't need to explain where the Borg came from, but it might be intriguing to know if there is "another" machine race similar or different to the Borg.
A machine planet doesn't look like Borg at all, the Borg are not Machines.
V'Ger thought of Carbon based life as vermin, the Borg are carbon based life with synthetic enhancements, they aren't machines at all. Data is a machine, the Borg wanted to change that.
The Borg are not Machines, the Borg consider Machines, like Data, to be inferior. V'Ger was a Machine, V'Ger landed on a planet of Machines and was "repaired", V'Ger had no concept of sentient organic life, and wouldn't accept at first that it was created originally by Organic life.
The Borg is a Collective, V'Ger was an individual. At the time V'Ger was launched from Earth the Borg were already identifiable as the Borg we know, though with a smaller domain and as a less powerful species, meaning the V'Ger/Decker merger postdates the Borg and can't be responsible for their creation, unless you want to believe that Merger fell backwards in time, lost all its memories and technology, got really tiny, and somehow started making more.
V'ger's primary mission was to explore, the Borg think exploration is irrelevant.
V'Ger sought to merge with the maker, who V'Ger though was a machine (Aren't we all made in God's image afterall? =P ) because V'Ger had already explored this entire Universe and was seeking to find new things to explore (parallel dimensions). This is obviously massively beyond the capability of the Borg.
I don't know how anyone can draw any parallels at all between the Borg and V'Ger's adopted machine race. It seems to me there is a good chance that race doesn't even exist in our Galaxy since we don't know anything about the phenomenon that Voyager fell into that brought it to them, and they are clearly capable of long range extra-galactic travel in short amounts of time.
That's possible, but I personally feel a bit of a stretch, considering the very alien appearance of V'ger's vessel and apparent level of technology. I'm not going to deny that it'd be interesting to see some more background on the Old Ones, but not sure we want *everyone* to be connected to each other in some way either, Old Ones, V'ger, Borg, and humans together. I'm also curious about where you got the 500,000 years old info from, as I can't seem to find anything on that. Was that in the episode(s) relating to the Old Ones?
I understand the need not to want to connect everything. And I got the 500,000 figure from Memory Alpha.
Although I do like the Iconian/machine race connection possibility. I was thinking after I first posted that the machine race or V'ger *could* have studied or met the Iconians at some point (or vice versa?), which led me to thinking it'd be kind of neat if we could get the prior-mentioned "memory wall" outpost as some sort of one-shot story mission that might give us more hints about the Iconians.
In addition, I only just remembered that the perhaps-canon Star Trek (2009) spin-off comics (believe the film writers have direct input in them) had a V'ger cameo with Nero stating that V'ger and the Borg have a common ancestry of sorts after communing with V'ger (in order to use its capabilities to compute a time and location for Spock's arrival in the film after the Borg-enhanced Narada was lured to V'ger due to their shared machine intelligences. It's in the Nero issue 3).
This definitely lends to the idea that the machine race could definitely be at the heart of things, though that doesn't necessarily rule out the idea that the Borg are inspired by V'ger. Perhaps the Borg's earliest development was due to the machine race somehow, directly or indirectly, during a point where the Borg were less interested in organics than they were in technology (again, referring to the earliest Borg episodes). But with knowledge of what became of V'ger, the ultimate and perfect merging of man and machine that transcended existence, I imagine that would be a bit of a game-changer. Suddenly, merging with fleshy organics isn't just handy and a good way to recycle, but now it's a way to *ascend*!
I will definitely say, this all is a lot more interesting and likely than the way the Destiny novels handled it...not like the novels don't already have some half a dozen different origin stories for the Borg alone that conflict with Destiny as it is.
Yes, I have the Countdown comic and think that connection is what Stahl could be alluding to. A common connection is favorable, but I personally don't like the ideas of the Borg being connected to the Iconians. As I said in a previous post, why the Borg sit still on their homeworld for 190,000 years?
But if there is a common plot, how would the Borg fit in? Since the Borg were originally humanoid, there is many possibilities.
Were the Pre-Borg the machine race's creators? Or were the machines the Biological origins of the Borg? (Never know, the Machines could've found Human DNA on V'ger when they found it and cloned life. Or they found pictures of humanoid life on the golden disks).
Did Pre-Borg explorers stumble into the Machine Planet and either got cybernetically enhanced (by will or with their concent?) or they learned from them?
In a vague sense, yes. But not really. The Borg don't seem to care how much resources are used. They won't stop, they may change tactics but it's delaying the inevitable. It's not really important though.
My thougths with V'Ger are: Where/when did it pop up? We still don't know. Until we know that any speculation about it's conenction to the Borg is futile.
The Vaadwaur connection is an interesting one, but... why do we trust them? We know they lied about a bunch of other things.
Voyager (the series) stated quite clearly that the Borg were around atleast 900 years prior to the episode (Dragon's Teeth), which would make it sometime in the 1470s.
V'Ger (Voyager 6) was lost sometime in the 1970s, and later found by the Enterprise in 2271. I don't see how V'Ger could have been "the origin of the Borg" when the Borg were around for atleast 500 years before Voyager 6 disappered. Unless you factor in time travel, which is a whole different matter entirely.
V'Ger (Voyager 6) was lost sometime in the 1970s, and later found by the Enterprise in 2271. I don't see how V'Ger could have been "the origin of the Borg" when the Borg were around for atleast 500 years before Voyager 6 disappered. Unless you factor in time travel, which is a whole different matter entirely.[/QUOTE]
Voyager 6 was lost in a black hole. You are assuming that it only traveled in space. What if it also traveled in time as well. Spock found that V'Ger has data about entire galaxies in it's 3-D storage area. V'Ger could have falling back through time and traveled the Universe before return back to Earth. Yes it's just speculation, but anything is possible.
And I don't really like Legacy's take on the Borg origin. Given the shape of the command ships, V'Ger undoubtedly encountered the Borg at sometline in the STO timeline. A featured episode exploring that encounter and possibly harken back to the Borg's originals could be very interesting story wise.
I understand the need not to want to connect everything. And I got the 500,000 figure from Memory Alpha.
Ah, yeah, I read that just now from the article relating to the Mudd androids, though it says their estimated life duration is 500,000 years, not that they've necessarily been around that long.
Yes, I have the Countdown comic and think that connection is what Stahl could be alluding to. A common connection is favorable, but I personally don't like the ideas of the Borg being connected to the Iconians. As I said in a previous post, why the Borg sit still on their homeworld for 190,000 years?
But if there is a common plot, how would the Borg fit in? Since the Borg were originally humanoid, there is many possibilities.
Were the Pre-Borg the machine race's creators? Or were the machines the Biological origins of the Borg? (Never know, the Machines could've found Human DNA on V'ger when they found it and cloned life. Or they found pictures of humanoid life on the golden disks).
Did Pre-Borg explorers stumble into the Machine Planet and either got cybernetically enhanced (by will or with their concent?) or they learned from them?
So many possibilities.
The Countdown comic too fills in some stuff, but it's the Nero collection of issues that take place during Nero's exile in the altered past that deal with V'ger. It's totally geeky delicious to see V'ger in the alternate reality.
You're probably right that Stahl's referring to that little tidbit Nero mentions, the Borg and V'ger having a linked ancestry to something else, the machine race or such. Considering how the Countdown issues are basically an STO prequel comic as well, I'd like to think the info from the Nero issues that still relate to the prime timeline, such as V'ger's past, are something we might get to see in some manner in STO.
However, I didn't mean that the Borg relate to the Iconians as much as I meant the machine race might have some knowledge or interactions with them in the far-flung past, something V'ger might know about if it wasn't V'ger itself that had such interactions. So I was thinking it'd be neat if we could see a leftover of V'ger's travels in STO, an outpost or remnant of a lost probe that we could examine, something strange and mysterious that could be accessed to reveal something relating to STO's Iconian troubles. And being that nothing V'ger does is small, could be a sizable "probe" with us hopping around in EVA suits.
I can dream =P
I do like the idea of pre-Borg finding and adapting some machine race technology for themselves, but obviously it's not enough to make them as powerful and advanced as V'ger's own advanced, immense vessel implies. As we know, the Borg are only now seeming to develop similar devices and weapons with their "B'ger" vessels. Whether this is from them being inspired by V'ger as my previous posts have suggested and/or they're just "naturally evolving" into this advanced state, as you say...there are possibilities.
It also seems to me like the Borg are perverting the machine race's technology, using it in ways they may not care for, though who knows what the machine race really feels about it, if they're even still around.
Well, anything would be better than what they did in the novels... /shudder...
A v'ger connection would be stretching things, though. I'm sure there's more than one mechanized race out there, just like there's more than one organic race.
Well, anything would be better than what they did in the novels... /shudder...
A v'ger connection would be stretching things, though. I'm sure there's more than one mechanized race out there, just like there's more than one organic race.
The key here isn't V'ger, but the machine race that rebuilt V'ger and sent it on its way. Or perhaps whatever created them, even. We already have hints from V'ger's cameo in the Nero comics that V'ger and the Borg have a common ancestry, that somehow they're not related directly to each other but something else, being more like...brothers or cousins to each other, however distant.
This gives us plenty of room to suggest the Borg may be using *some* of the similar technology, but obviously not enough to have been on par with V'ger. But they're getting there...when they have ships producing twelfth-power energy fields that cover a distance of anywhere from 2AU (the more recent and realistic Director's Cut dialog) to 82AU (the original theatrical dialog), then we should start worrying.
The Countdown comic too fills in some stuff, but it's the Nero collection of issues that take place during Nero's exile in the altered past that deal with V'ger. It's totally geeky delicious to see V'ger in the alternate reality.
You're probably right that Stahl's referring to that little tidbit Nero mentions, the Borg and V'ger having a linked ancestry to something else, the machine race or such. Considering how the Countdown issues are basically an STO prequel comic as well, I'd like to think the info from the Nero issues that still relate to the prime timeline, such as V'ger's past, are something we might get to see in some manner in STO.
However, I didn't mean that the Borg relate to the Iconians as much as I meant the machine race might have some knowledge or interactions with them in the far-flung past, something V'ger might know about if it wasn't V'ger itself that had such interactions. So I was thinking it'd be neat if we could see a leftover of V'ger's travels in STO, an outpost or remnant of a lost probe that we could examine, something strange and mysterious that could be accessed to reveal something relating to STO's Iconian troubles. And being that nothing V'ger does is small, could be a sizable "probe" with us hopping around in EVA suits.
I can dream =P
I do like the idea of pre-Borg finding and adapting some machine race technology for themselves, but obviously it's not enough to make them as powerful and advanced as V'ger's own advanced, immense vessel implies. As we know, the Borg are only now seeming to develop similar devices and weapons with their "B'ger" vessels. Whether this is from them being inspired by V'ger as my previous posts have suggested and/or they're just "naturally evolving" into this advanced state, as you say...there are possibilities.
It also seems to me like the Borg are perverting the machine race's technology, using it in ways they may not care for, though who knows what the machine race really feels about it, if they're even still around.
It's possible, and could settle the debate on the age of the Borg. Perhaps the Machine Race was around 200,000 years ago, but the early Borg didn't come into existance until a 1,000 years ago.
Maybe this Machine Race was pivotal in the defeat of the Iconians? That they were too destructive and had to be stopped.
In revenge, the Iconian survivors found about the Pre-Borg and corrupted the cybernetics and turned them into the Borg. They unleased the Borg into the Universe, which destroyed the Machine race, and then when the Borg assimilated most or all of the Galaxy, the planned on unleashed a virus that disabled the Borg.
(Which explains the nastiness of the Iconian Virus Probes, they were made to stop the machine race and the Borg).
So with the Borg gone, they rule the Galaxy once more!
You can always tell 90s Trek fans by their insistence on linking everything to the Borg. V'ger, Doomsday Machine in Peter David's book, Enterprise, First Contact...
The Borg became lame villians in the same way TRIBBLE eventually did due to overuse and attempting to make them galactic black hats. They should have been forces of nature like a tornado throughout the series run. Something you survive, not defeat.
But then Hugh happened and then Janeway spanked them for four years and that ship sunk.
You can always tell 90s Trek fans by their insistence on linking everything to the Borg. V'ger, Doomsday Machine in Peter David's book, Enterprise, First Contact...
The Borg became lame villians in the same way TRIBBLE eventually did due to overuse and attempting to make them galactic black hats. They should have been forces of nature like a tornado throughout the series run. Something you survive, not defeat.
But then Hugh happened and then Janeway spanked them for four years and that ship sunk.
Eh. I feel somewhat the same way as you but I think moving on calls for demystifying the Borg. Take away their mystery and THEN make them a more mundane part of the landscape, I say.
In the distant reaches of the delta quadrant an ancient race stands on the cusp of extinction, a mysterious plague ravages them killing thousands by the day. Swift drastic action must be taken and so morals are thrown to the wayside. A doctor has an Idea to fight the disease on the microscopic level with nanites, their own immunities were not doing the job so the nanites could instead. However who would volunteer for such drastic experimental treatment, no one in their right mind, however something must be done 20% of the population is dead already and the disease is always fatal. Doom-sayers in the anarchy that is descending preaching the end is neigh and people should just give in to their fate as resistance is futile! So it is on that basis that high level decisions are made, there is a nearby world with a less advanced race who might serve as guinea pigs infect them and then have the nanites cure them, to hell with the morality this is the last ditch grasp of our civilisation at survival. So it is done and all appears to be well in the primitives the virus is completely halted but more strangely there is no disease whatsoever. This calls for closer inspection so teams are sent and what they witness is astonishing and horrifying, mutations and machinations only in their fleeing flight do they realise their mistake. In their haste to save themselves their programming was incomplete the nanites went beyond their mandate not only to cure the plauge but to remove all imperfection. The teams rush back to their craft trying desperately to get warning back to the home-world but it is too late by the time they get close they are cured too. So the shuttle-craft return home and hoping that no news is good news the government wait to see if they have been saved however they are to be doomed by their own hand even faster than at the hands of the plague because against the cure resistance is indeed futile and now is born a new race with one mandate, to cure the universe of imperfection!
Eh. I feel somewhat the same way as you but I think moving on calls for demystifying the Borg. Take away their mystery and THEN make them a more mundane part of the landscape, I say.
It could still work. We know how hurricanes happen and their mechanics. That doesn't make them less of a terrifying experience.
One of the reasons the Romulans have always stayed cool is that they'd show up for an episode or two, and then vanish again behind their iron curtain. It always added a sense of their appearances being something important.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
Why move on? Why demystify? Why are we even trying to link V'ger the Borg and the Iconians into one story? What is with this need to have a quick easy explanation for everything? It is a big damn galaxy in an even bigger universe and there is plenty of room for these entities to exist in circumstances completely unrelated to each other. It is poor story telling creating a scenario where all of these mysteries lead to a simple unifying source and sometimes it feels like the efforts of a bad cop following the path of least resistance trying to link all of his unsolved cases to the one suspect he has in custody.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
Why move on? Why demystify? Why are we even trying to link V'ger the Borg and the Iconians into one story? What is with this need to have a quick easy explanation for everything? It is a big damn galaxy in an even bigger universe and there is plenty of room for these entities to exist in circumstances completely unrelated to each other. It is poor story telling creating a scenario where all of these mysteries lead to a simple unifying source and sometimes it feels like the efforts of a bad cop following the path of least resistance trying to link all of his unsolved cases to the one suspect he has in custody.
That's why I hate the books, they always have to link something to something else....like Q and Trelane or Characters from the TV show showing up as if the Federation only has 30 people especially TOS characters who somehow live forever.
It's possible, and could settle the debate on the age of the Borg. Perhaps the Machine Race was around 200,000 years ago, but the early Borg didn't come into existance until a 1,000 years ago.
Maybe this Machine Race was pivotal in the defeat of the Iconians? That they were too destructive and had to be stopped.
In revenge, the Iconian survivors found about the Pre-Borg and corrupted the cybernetics and turned them into the Borg. They unleased the Borg into the Universe, which destroyed the Machine race, and then when the Borg assimilated most or all of the Galaxy, the planned on unleashed a virus that disabled the Borg.
(Which explains the nastiness of the Iconian Virus Probes, they were made to stop the machine race and the Borg).
So with the Borg gone, they rule the Galaxy once more!
That's why I hate the books, they always have to link something to something else....like Q and Trelane or Characters from the TV show showing up as if the Federation only has 30 people especially TOS characters who somehow live forever.
The Q - Trelane connection makes sense though. Sure there are several races liek that, but.... Trelane acted like a Q. But it's obvious his abilities were of a greatly lesser scale.
Seriously though.... if those are the stakes.... I don't want to meet the Vampires....
Ohhh, forgot about the killer Ice cream cones.
I liked the Vendetta novel, was well done.
Pretty much the premise stands, that the Ancient Race (the machine race), saw the Borg as a threat and created the Planet Killers to destroy them. Destroying an entire planet of Borg or a large base of Borg was more efficient than insurgent-style tactics of taking down Borg one at a time. And the Planet Killer's pure offense with the most powerful defense was so formidable, not even the Borg could easily adapt to.
That's why I hate the books, they always have to link something to something else....like Q and Trelane or Characters from the TV show showing up as if the Federation only has 30 people especially TOS characters who somehow live forever.
I seem to recall one of the books had Q responsible for Gary Mitchell. It's like, god-like beings are only acceptable if they have 90s hair?
Comments
We do know of one race (Icheb's) who willingly sacrificed children to the Borg in an attempt to keep the rest of them safe.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
Blew my mind, man.
The Q connection would just be interesting, but the 'V'ger intercept' theory would explain why the Borg would even have a plan to go back in time instead of merely throwing more resources around.
Indeed. "I am the Borg", the Queen said. It seems to me she's a projection of the Collective mind.
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
Clearly the El-Aurians were a powerful species at one point, though their past has been left intentionally muddied. I could buy that at some point in the past there was some kind of schism among them in the "quest for perfection" between the purely mental (ones who searched out the Nexus) and the technological (scientists experimenting with cybernetics that became the Borg).
The El-Aurians losing control of their own creation would explain a lot of things about both pasts.
El-Aurian's natural telepathy would come in handy for building an interconnected cyborg super-brain, you'd figure.
It would also explain why most Borg look more or less human, like El-Aurians do.
Hey, I have a lot of time to think.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
While I enjoy a good discussion between fans on the topic of V'ger, I feel similarly with regard to a Borg origin story. I'd likely be disappointed by any final word on the mystery. I much prefer the numerous angles everyone brings to the mystery. Leave that to the novel writers. The fan fictions. Or in the case of STO, the Foundry authors. Where more than one PoV is possible.
I am sure there are at least 50% out there who disagree, but "Dragons teeth" kinda says I am right.
A machine planet doesn't look like Borg at all, the Borg are not Machines.
V'Ger thought of Carbon based life as vermin, the Borg are carbon based life with synthetic enhancements, they aren't machines at all. Data is a machine, the Borg wanted to change that.
The Borg are not Machines, the Borg consider Machines, like Data, to be inferior. V'Ger was a Machine, V'Ger landed on a planet of Machines and was "repaired", V'Ger had no concept of sentient organic life, and wouldn't accept at first that it was created originally by Organic life.
The Borg is a Collective, V'Ger was an individual. At the time V'Ger was launched from Earth the Borg were already identifiable as the Borg we know, though with a smaller domain and as a less powerful species, meaning the V'Ger/Decker merger postdates the Borg and can't be responsible for their creation, unless you want to believe that Merger fell backwards in time, lost all its memories and technology, got really tiny, and somehow started making more.
V'ger's primary mission was to explore, the Borg think exploration is irrelevant.
V'Ger sought to merge with the maker, who V'Ger though was a machine (Aren't we all made in God's image afterall? =P ) because V'Ger had already explored this entire Universe and was seeking to find new things to explore (parallel dimensions). This is obviously massively beyond the capability of the Borg.
I don't know how anyone can draw any parallels at all between the Borg and V'Ger's adopted machine race. It seems to me there is a good chance that race doesn't even exist in our Galaxy since we don't know anything about the phenomenon that Voyager fell into that brought it to them, and they are clearly capable of long range extra-galactic travel in short amounts of time.
I understand the need not to want to connect everything. And I got the 500,000 figure from Memory Alpha.
Yes, I have the Countdown comic and think that connection is what Stahl could be alluding to. A common connection is favorable, but I personally don't like the ideas of the Borg being connected to the Iconians. As I said in a previous post, why the Borg sit still on their homeworld for 190,000 years?
But if there is a common plot, how would the Borg fit in? Since the Borg were originally humanoid, there is many possibilities.
Were the Pre-Borg the machine race's creators? Or were the machines the Biological origins of the Borg? (Never know, the Machines could've found Human DNA on V'ger when they found it and cloned life. Or they found pictures of humanoid life on the golden disks).
Did Pre-Borg explorers stumble into the Machine Planet and either got cybernetically enhanced (by will or with their concent?) or they learned from them?
So many possibilities.
My thougths with V'Ger are: Where/when did it pop up? We still don't know. Until we know that any speculation about it's conenction to the Borg is futile.
The Vaadwaur connection is an interesting one, but... why do we trust them? We know they lied about a bunch of other things.
My character Tsin'xing
I have a lil mnemonic I use to remember how to spell the gun that shoots: A cannon has two wheels.
This is in reference to cannon and canon.
Get it? Cannon has two N's and a cannon has two wheels.
http://triroute.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Tsar-Cannon.jpg
V'Ger (Voyager 6) was lost sometime in the 1970s, and later found by the Enterprise in 2271. I don't see how V'Ger could have been "the origin of the Borg" when the Borg were around for atleast 500 years before Voyager 6 disappered. Unless you factor in time travel, which is a whole different matter entirely.[/QUOTE]
Voyager 6 was lost in a black hole. You are assuming that it only traveled in space. What if it also traveled in time as well. Spock found that V'Ger has data about entire galaxies in it's 3-D storage area. V'Ger could have falling back through time and traveled the Universe before return back to Earth. Yes it's just speculation, but anything is possible.
And I don't really like Legacy's take on the Borg origin. Given the shape of the command ships, V'Ger undoubtedly encountered the Borg at sometline in the STO timeline. A featured episode exploring that encounter and possibly harken back to the Borg's originals could be very interesting story wise.
Ah, yeah, I read that just now from the article relating to the Mudd androids, though it says their estimated life duration is 500,000 years, not that they've necessarily been around that long.
The Countdown comic too fills in some stuff, but it's the Nero collection of issues that take place during Nero's exile in the altered past that deal with V'ger. It's totally geeky delicious to see V'ger in the alternate reality.
You're probably right that Stahl's referring to that little tidbit Nero mentions, the Borg and V'ger having a linked ancestry to something else, the machine race or such. Considering how the Countdown issues are basically an STO prequel comic as well, I'd like to think the info from the Nero issues that still relate to the prime timeline, such as V'ger's past, are something we might get to see in some manner in STO.
However, I didn't mean that the Borg relate to the Iconians as much as I meant the machine race might have some knowledge or interactions with them in the far-flung past, something V'ger might know about if it wasn't V'ger itself that had such interactions. So I was thinking it'd be neat if we could see a leftover of V'ger's travels in STO, an outpost or remnant of a lost probe that we could examine, something strange and mysterious that could be accessed to reveal something relating to STO's Iconian troubles. And being that nothing V'ger does is small, could be a sizable "probe" with us hopping around in EVA suits.
I can dream =P
I do like the idea of pre-Borg finding and adapting some machine race technology for themselves, but obviously it's not enough to make them as powerful and advanced as V'ger's own advanced, immense vessel implies. As we know, the Borg are only now seeming to develop similar devices and weapons with their "B'ger" vessels. Whether this is from them being inspired by V'ger as my previous posts have suggested and/or they're just "naturally evolving" into this advanced state, as you say...there are possibilities.
It also seems to me like the Borg are perverting the machine race's technology, using it in ways they may not care for, though who knows what the machine race really feels about it, if they're even still around.
A v'ger connection would be stretching things, though. I'm sure there's more than one mechanized race out there, just like there's more than one organic race.
The doors, Mister Scott!
The key here isn't V'ger, but the machine race that rebuilt V'ger and sent it on its way. Or perhaps whatever created them, even. We already have hints from V'ger's cameo in the Nero comics that V'ger and the Borg have a common ancestry, that somehow they're not related directly to each other but something else, being more like...brothers or cousins to each other, however distant.
This gives us plenty of room to suggest the Borg may be using *some* of the similar technology, but obviously not enough to have been on par with V'ger. But they're getting there...when they have ships producing twelfth-power energy fields that cover a distance of anywhere from 2AU (the more recent and realistic Director's Cut dialog) to 82AU (the original theatrical dialog), then we should start worrying.
It's possible, and could settle the debate on the age of the Borg. Perhaps the Machine Race was around 200,000 years ago, but the early Borg didn't come into existance until a 1,000 years ago.
Maybe this Machine Race was pivotal in the defeat of the Iconians? That they were too destructive and had to be stopped.
In revenge, the Iconian survivors found about the Pre-Borg and corrupted the cybernetics and turned them into the Borg. They unleased the Borg into the Universe, which destroyed the Machine race, and then when the Borg assimilated most or all of the Galaxy, the planned on unleashed a virus that disabled the Borg.
(Which explains the nastiness of the Iconian Virus Probes, they were made to stop the machine race and the Borg).
So with the Borg gone, they rule the Galaxy once more!
The Borg became lame villians in the same way TRIBBLE eventually did due to overuse and attempting to make them galactic black hats. They should have been forces of nature like a tornado throughout the series run. Something you survive, not defeat.
But then Hugh happened and then Janeway spanked them for four years and that ship sunk.
Eh. I feel somewhat the same way as you but I think moving on calls for demystifying the Borg. Take away their mystery and THEN make them a more mundane part of the landscape, I say.
It could still work. We know how hurricanes happen and their mechanics. That doesn't make them less of a terrifying experience.
One of the reasons the Romulans have always stayed cool is that they'd show up for an episode or two, and then vanish again behind their iron curtain. It always added a sense of their appearances being something important.
"We are smart." - Grebnedlog
Member of Alliance Central Command/boq botlhra'ghom
That's why I hate the books, they always have to link something to something else....like Q and Trelane or Characters from the TV show showing up as if the Federation only has 30 people especially TOS characters who somehow live forever.
Seriously though.... if those are the stakes.... I don't want to meet the Vampires....
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
Ohhh, forgot about the killer Ice cream cones.
I liked the Vendetta novel, was well done.
Pretty much the premise stands, that the Ancient Race (the machine race), saw the Borg as a threat and created the Planet Killers to destroy them. Destroying an entire planet of Borg or a large base of Borg was more efficient than insurgent-style tactics of taking down Borg one at a time. And the Planet Killer's pure offense with the most powerful defense was so formidable, not even the Borg could easily adapt to.
I seem to recall one of the books had Q responsible for Gary Mitchell. It's like, god-like beings are only acceptable if they have 90s hair?