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Will The Borg.....

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  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited January 2015
    2. Because we still don't know all that much about the borg (canon reason), particularly any details of their long-term plan (beyond one or two words they keep repeating.)

    They don't have a long-term plan. Somebody in the "peace with the Borg" nonsense thread compared them quite well to a botnet. They do what they do because they're bound by their programming.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
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  • duncanidaho11duncanidaho11 Member Posts: 7,980 Arc User
    edited January 2015
    starswordc wrote: »
    They don't have a long-term plan. Somebody in the "peace with the Borg" nonsense thread compared them quite well to a botnet. They do what they do because they're bound by their programming.

    That very debatable. The borg have been written as programmed automata (see. tropes in sci-fi) but there's plenty of inconsistencies, the most obvious being the queen with a definite humanoid personality. If you take the borg as a definite entity (not a plot device) then you have to look at it as an extension of human social evolution where the relationship between individuals, mob psychology, and organizational figureheads has been radically shaped by technology. Each exists (unlike in a bot-net) but under very different terms to produce their social structure.

    What that will create, and just what it is doing now, is the important question in Star Trek. We've seen the ground level of borg assimilation but not the higher level "decision making" (though that may be an entirely figurative lable) that goes into it. The borg MAY be just responding to a program but what that is and what it will result in are totally unknown. What will the borg do when finished with the galaxy? Why are they "skipping" vulnerable civilizations in the delta quadrant in order to attack the Federation, and more importantly just one species in it?")

    The reason for this is "because TV/Movie drama demands it" but if you buy into the universe then you have a set of very interesting aspects to the borg that aren't covered by the botnet theory.
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  • lordkhoraklordkhorak Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited January 2015
    starswordc wrote: »
    You're missing the part in First Contact where the Queen's cube was on the verge of shield failure before the Enterprise even got there. Attrition and brute force works on the Borg just as well as on anyone else, and if there's one thing Dominion naval forces have shown themselves to be good at, it's sheer weight of firepower and being able to replace losses with alacrity.

    Heavy damage to the outer hull and fluctuations in the power grid.

    Which was doing absolutely nothing to actually stop the Borg Cube. You apparently missed everything else where the Cube was happily slaughtering ships all around it with no sign of being particularly inconvenienced. You can see it. Frakes even went to the effort of demanding a highly detailed model of the Cube so you could see it really well. We don't even know what the mention of the outer hull even means. Do they have an inner one? Do they care? Is the outer hull an easily regenerated, somewhat ablative layer like in Q Who?

    My God, the very first thing you've done is to attempt to completely contradict the entire point of the start of the film. Which was that sending Picard away was dumb and without his intervention Starfleet had crushingly lost. I am completely confident that the rest of your post will be more reasoned and consi-...
    I think that in comparison to what we've seen of Wolf 359, STFC shows more than anything else that doctrinal improvements are much more important against the Borg than new tech is. In "Emissary" we had the fleet at Wolf 359 coming at the cube in dribs and drabs, one or two ships at a time, and getting shredded piecemeal because they were basically trying to take it one-on-one. In First Contact the fleet apparently hits the cube all at once and fares far better, and I'd venture to say they would've won without Picard but they ran out of room to keep the cube away from Earth.

    ....oh my God I'm so very surprised that we've continued to ignore the film in favour of made up stuff. How did I ever fail to see this coming.

    You are wrong on every count, by the word of the show itself. Everything you just said has nothing whatsoever to back it up against the endless repetition of practically all the Borg appearances. They adapt to weapons almost immediately, rendering them basically useless, which requires a swift response on the part of their opponent. The Borg Queen even used this against Seven, by forcing her to make the adaptations herself that rendered attacking vessels meaningless.

    It is an outright plot point and defining trait of the Borg. It is an outright plot point and defining trait of fighting the Borg that you have to constantly modify your attack so they don't just no-sell it via their magical adaptation. The Borg enforce an ironic code of 'adapt or die' on their victims.

    AND you apparently also didn't listen to any of the film previous to the battle, where the command channel for the battle very, very, very clearly describes individual ships being moved around. Even BEFORE battle is joined the Defiant and Bozeman were falling back to a 'mobile position'. They even had a 'defence perimeter' for the Borg to instantly break through. Funnily enough, this sounds rather like the sort of thing we saw in the literal few SECONDS we ever saw of Wolf 359. The giant Mob Of Getting Our A*ses Kicked was the result of the Admiral's ship being destroyed.

    You have made up a vast pile of tosh with no basis. There's literally no evidence whatsoever that Sector 001 involved any different tactics, we can guess that it might have involved more ships, and a raft of evidence consisting of the entirety of Star Trek to show that the real difference when battling the Borg is the specific ability to get around their 'haha, TRIBBLE you' magical adaptation that renders them basically immune. No-one has ever even mentioned or suggested the idea that 'just use more' is a 'tactic' (Inigo has something to say about your use of the word) that can be used against the Borg....unless you're intending to build a weapon that fires solar eruptions. Though by that point you could play Ping Pong with the Death Star, so TRIBBLE it.

    It was even a damned plot point of Species 8472 that their immunity to assimilation made it impossible for the Borg to fight them!
    If what you say is true, that the Borg only hit them with a deep-range scout vessel, that also plays into it. The Borg were tactically brilliant at Wolf 359 (by comparison to peacetime Starfleet, anyway) but strategically poor in not bringing sufficient force to bear on the problem (perhaps through no fault of their own). Sure, they might have assimilated Earth and caused serious chaos, but watch as they subsequently gets dogpiled by the Klingons and the various Federation member states' native militaries, which were completely ignored by the cube.

    The Borg were not tactically brilliant. They did the exact same thing they have done in literally every single instance we have seen them. A direct, brute force assault that relies on their strength of adaptation to take everything thrown at them, then use that adaptation to also render your own defences useless. They do this to the point that a Probe fearlessly tried to take on Voyager despite being obviously outclassed, instead of doing anything else at all.

    As a cherry on top of your made up diatribe, you suggest that, apparently, the Borg assimilating the entirety of Earth isn't an apocalyptic scenario for everyone around, who similarly have no capacity to resist the Borg or assault the vast array of now heavily armed and virtually impregnable space stations and platforms they own. Before they've started building more Cubes.

    Pretty much, there's literally nothing shown in Star Trek to suggest that the Dominion wouldn't have gotten their pants pulled up over their damn head by the Borg, same as everyone else. Wolf 359 shows what happens when you fight the Borg WITH years of foreknowledge and explicit data from engaging them before. Almost the entire saucer section of an Excelsior gets disintegrated in a single shot, that's what happens.

    The Battle of Sector 001 shows what happens when you've been researching even more data and direct action with explicit anti-Borg research.....you still get your s*** pushed in.

    In fact, it would be an absolutely HILARIOUS alt-history fanfic for, right in the middle of the battle in Sacrifice of Angels, all communications to suddenly be overridden.

    "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

    Que absolute carnage and a war off the rails as a Cube starts mashing its way through both fleets.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • wombat140wombat140 Member Posts: 971 Arc User
    edited January 2015
    crowley875 wrote: »
    Why do you think the Borg keep attacking the Alpha Quadrant? The Borg got their bottom's kicked so many times in the past 50 years. They became obsessed with us Alpha Quadrant folks, they're throwing everything they have at us and they won't stop until they succeed. :D

    This actually makes sense as an explanation. The Collective is known to be on the lookout for particularly good stuff to assimilate - remember how it discarded the Kazon because it thought the Kazon were crummy, and how it got slightly obsessed with trying to get the supposedly "perfect" 8472's. It probably looked at the things the Federation keep doing to it and decided "I WANT SOME OF THAT!"
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