test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Borg - Adapting to Cryogenics?
tilarta
Member Posts: 1,801 Arc User
Currently, there are 2 weapons that deal cold damage in the game:
Compressed Cryo Launcher
CRM 200
I haven't used the CRM 200, but I did use the Cryo Launcher against the Borg.
And was quite surprised to see they are "adapting" to it!
Cryogenic weapons are NOT energy weapons, so why the Borg adapt to them?
They either fire a cloud of freezing gas or chill the environment around the beam as a secondary effect.
Temperature drops do not have energy frequencies, so it's impossible for the Borg to adapt to essentially what is a freezing effect.
I seriously think the Borg's ability to adapt to "environmental weapons" such as these should be removed.
Compressed Cryo Launcher
CRM 200
I haven't used the CRM 200, but I did use the Cryo Launcher against the Borg.
And was quite surprised to see they are "adapting" to it!
Cryogenic weapons are NOT energy weapons, so why the Borg adapt to them?
They either fire a cloud of freezing gas or chill the environment around the beam as a secondary effect.
Temperature drops do not have energy frequencies, so it's impossible for the Borg to adapt to essentially what is a freezing effect.
I seriously think the Borg's ability to adapt to "environmental weapons" such as these should be removed.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Post edited by tilarta on
0
Comments
That said, I do agree, as long as the removal of their adapting to it wouldn't make like STFs or anything against the Borg too easy.
Fix this TRIBBLE.
Even folks that just SHOOT them have to re-frakking-modulate every second shot. No kidding. Had an entire messed-up STF ground mission where everyone had to remodulate so often it was quite the cause for chat-based-griping. We all thought it was fubar.
They consider swords and bullets too "primitive" to bother defending themselves against.
Unfortunately, for Borg Drones, this means if someone has access to weapons like this, the Borg won't last long!
Bullets, blades, even hand-to-hand combat has proven fatal to the Borg.
B'elanna Torres attacked the Borg with a access panel cover once and defeated them!
Not once has it been shown that the Borg have any interest or inclination to protect themselves from "physical weapons".
Also, I believe Borg shields operate on a "capitance principle".
They absorb/dissipate all energy fields directed at them.
But this shield, even on Borg vessels, has never protected them from physical impact.
Because capacitors are useless unless the energy being directed at them has a "charge" and physical objects are uncharged in the conventional sense.
Good thing they never encountered Mass Driver technology (Mass Effect) or they wouldn't have lasted long!
Mass Driver coils accelerate solid objects to relavistic velocities and well, you can see what that would do to the Borg!
A missile is nothing more sophisicated then a 20 kilogram weight, a bullet is a metal particle the size of a sand grain.
So, in conclusion, the Borg are never going to be protected from kinetic attacks.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
From my understanding of Physics (lol exactly), if the Borg have the capacity to adapt to frequency and wavelength changes in the electromagnetic spectrum (such things being the hallmark variables of energy weapons in particular) then given 'heat' or the absence of heat, 'cold', is just another temperature gradient (higher frequency EM waves and radiation), they should conceivably be able to adapt to it. At least thats my understanding of it.
In which case, Borg adaption is really powerful (not to even touch upon the biological/chemical based adaption capabilities).
There's an Enterprise episode where the Borg "die" because their vessel crashes into the north pole and they're frozen solid.
It's not until they're defrosted that their nanites can reactivate them.
So, based on this evidence, I would assume that the Borg are as vulnerable to extreme cold as anyone else.
Somehow they survive in space, but different physics principles apply there.
It's harder for body heat to be leeched in space and the radiation levels cook you anyway, so I would assume that being in space is something they can resist.
And cold doesn't really have frequencies, as I've said, it's natural.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
There could have been other issues there though, like they could have been damaged in the crash and their systems were not up to handling the cold in addition to whatever other self repair they needed.
Sounds more reasonable than just cold being a factor. It makes sense to expect Borg to be more efficient in cold climates due to them being part machine. Also, cold is the easiest damage type to adapt to since it only requires activating a few heating elements.
One thing I saw though, is that when I use Exothermic Induction Field... they DON'T adapt to it's fire damage (I've tried this ten times in a row on Borg NPC's... but no adaption). Considering cold is considered energy damage, wouldn't fire be as well?
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Exactly. It seems exceedingly unlikely they have never invaded a cold climate before.
Some or all of that is game mechanics, but....
Fire is actually harder to adapt to than cold. You might be able to absorb some of the heat energy or reflect some away but insulating to keep heat in is almost always more efficient than doing so to keep heat out.
It would be complicated to do so, since organic tissues have a very narrow temperature range (36-38 degrees celsuis).
If a Borg possessed such a device internally, it would cook their organic components and kill them.
On the other hand, if the devices were installed in their armor and not inside their bodies, that would be more feasible.
But a rapid drop in temperature is more severe then a gradual decline.
The Borg's synthetic components would become brittle and shatter.
Their organic tissues would suffer "freezer burn" and become necrotic.
A Borg might be able to cope with a gradual decline in temperature, but no matter what kind of heating apparatus they had, it wouldn't cope very well with a sudden drop to below zero.
Heck, it'd explode like a bomb and kill the drone anyway!
And since Cryogenic weapons are designed specifically to drop the temperature below zero in a few seconds, this would be too much for a Borg drone to cope with.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
My thought is...the Borg must be adapting to the METHOD of cold being applied, not the cold itself. Like there is obviously something happening that would cause the sudden, almost instant drop of temperature. a mixture of chemicals, an energy that 'sucks up' heat energy, something like that. That is something they could possibly adapt to as well, thus needing the remodulation.
It is a thoughts which mostly fits what we know about the cold weapons, so it probably has quite a few holes in it.
Cold hurts them as any other energy weapon, but because they're half metal, the metal keeps working, i'm assuming because it has a very low freezing point... hence how they adapt to it.
Fire, on the other hand, is hurting the organic and metal aspects, interfering with the adaptation process.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
Aren't you making a lot of assumptions regarding the properties of borg tech? Based on what we do know, they would take losses from the first couple hits, but the data would be sent back to the collective and processed. The next time, their systems would know precisely how much and how fast to compensate.
And cold based weapons would not be as easy to remodulate as energy weapons.
The Borg can remodulate to energy all they like, but altering immutable laws of biology and physics, doubtful.
Unless they were pumping their drones full of antifreeze (which would require them to cart around vats of the liquid) and heating up their bodies prior to the impact of the "cold snap", there's not a lot they could do in preparation.
And well, cold temperatures impacting a heated object=explosion.
Not to mention that raising the body temperature of the Borg would cause "heat death" of the
organic components.
As I understand it, we're not hitting them with the beam directly, we're hitting them with the secondary effect of the weapon.
It's like using a targeting laser to hit a target with a missile, the beam doesn't hurt them, but the effect the beam has on the surrounding environment does.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
In all seriousness though, you shouldn't press the 'makes sense' point of fighting Borg with chilliness too much. We've seen these things walk around on the hull of starships without so much as a sweater, and space has been known to be a little nippy from time to time. Be glad that your frosty supersoaker does any damage at all.
Boom!
And despite what people think, space is not cold.
It's actually quite hot, in terms of energy.
Without the proper shielding, solar radiation will cook you in minutes.
Also, being a vaccuum, it's harder to "leech" body heat away.
Heat will move from a hot object to a cold one, but in space, there's nothing cold, no atmosphere.
So, unless you happen to touch a comet or a frozen moon, your body heat isn't going anywhere.
So, just because Borg can walk about on the hull of a spaceship without spacesuits doesn't indicate they have any cold tolerance.
If anything, it means just the opposite, they're having to resist severe levels of heat.
Bees like honey, they don't like vinegar.
Everytime someone makes a character that is an copy of an existing superhuman, Creativity is sad
Aww I was hoping no one would point that out. :P
In first contact they easily survived the cold void of space, cold compressed gases they should be able to shrug off easy enough.
Except that the Borg did not die. They just hibernated and as soon as they were thawed out, their bodies began repairing themselves. Perhaps the best explanation is that they simply were running out of energy and shut down, at which point they no longer were maintaining any metabolic processes, or were at an extremely reduced rate.
I think the OP has a point though. The borg adapt to energy weapons because they put out particles with a specific De Broglie wavelength frequency. It is not clear how "cold" weapons or Borg shield technology works, so it is difficult to come up with a scientific rational for whether or not they could adapt. Are the Cryogenic weapons shooting low-temperature gas? If so, perhaps the shields could adapt to the De Broglie wavelength of the atoms. Are they shooting some kind of an energy beam that can be used as a heat pump, like how laser cooling works? Then perhaps they can adapt to the frequency of that energy beam.
Actually, space is quite cold, overall. The low temperature interstellar medium is only a few degrees above absolute zero. However, the ISM around Earth is actually quite hot, about the temperature of the surface of the sun. But, it is also very low density, which means that it imparts very little heat.
Solar radiation will not "cook" you. The average human being radiates about 200 watts of power. The solar flux from the sun is about 350 Watts/m^2. So, someone in direct sunlight with perfect emissivity might be able to be heated up by direct sunlight in Earth's orbit. However, any blockage of the sun will drop the flux to nearly zero, which means the human body will quickly radiate heat via blackbody radiation. This is why a human being would freeze in the vaccume of space, not because space is cold (it is actually quite warm around earth's orbit) but rather because space is a near vaccume and the human body will radiate heat very quickly while absorbing nearly no heat through conduction.
Remember, there are three ways to gain/lose energy via heat transfer and humans, like every object in the universe, are always losing energy through blackbody radiation.