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Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
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Borg cube or Death Star?
Replicators.
Borg are almost just another form of replicators that prefer to use biological full sized hosts as their framework.
The baby is firefly fandom
Borg would assimilate the Death Star on first encounter. There’d never even be a fight.
The Borg’s first move is often to just beam drones over and start trying to assimilate people and technology.
I’d love to see the Jedi response to this. Who wins, borg personal modulating shields or lightsabers and force push?
…and what happens to the force when a Jedi is assimilated? Does the borg colective suddenly find out they had a lot of high midichlorian count drones in storage?
I think you’re probably going to end up getting into a lot of the metaphysical/philosophical/quasi-magical aspects of the force with that question.
The force isn’t just about how many midichlorians you have in your blood. The midichlorians help facilitate the physical connection to the energy of the force, but one still needs to be open to it mentally and spiritually. It is almost routinely demonstrated that connecting to the force requires discipline, meditation, and “clearing the mind”.
I’d argue that because the Borg are connected to the collective, they would be incapable of forming that connection. Drones don’t really have a mind or a spirit of their own. They can’t clear their mind. Literally, they can’t stop the constant stream of information, so long as they’re connected to the collective. And that’s to say nothing of the spiritual aspect.
Really, the force connects all living things. In a way, it’s a kind of a collective of its own. I feel like the Borg would have to be disconnected from their collective to feel the connection to another, but once you disconnect a drone, it’s ceases to be Borg.
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Without technology prepared to counter teleporters
like the shields all the ships in starwars have?
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The transporters thing always infuriated me, even as a kid. You can’t beam through shields, right? So, in Star Trek battles when the enemy’s shields go down it’s always, “Let’s teleport our guys in and have a pitched hallway battle with pew-pew guns, damaging random stuff and losing many of our own dudes,” and not, “Start transporting the enemy’s pilots and gunners into space, so we can just park someone in the driver’s seat afterwards and fly away with their ship.”
The main problem you’ll encounter in a Star Trek vs. Whoever matchup is not the technology and power levels between the combatants, it’s that everyone from the Star Trek universe is fucking stupid, both our Federation people and all the various chaotic evil bad guy alien races. Even the Borg.
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Its canon, species 8472’s combined ship super weapon thing has been shown to blow up whole planets and continuously work against the Borg. I would consider 8472’s super weapon as a in-universe death star equivalent
8472’s entire thing was organic modulation, making it impossible to adapt to.
The death star laser is based on the resonating frequency of a crystal. So it will always be the same. Easy for the borg to adapt to.
Question is can you overpower shields in Star Trek? I would postulate a “maybe” given that the Cardassians use a giant phaser on the front of their ships to break things, and they’re noted as being technologically inferior to the federation.
You can definitely overpower shields. Shields still need energy, and there are other factors involved on calculating shield integrity. Combat in Star Trek routinely shows bridge officers announcing the current strength of the shields as a percentage that drops as it absorbs more impact.
QED, the shield has its limits, so presumably a sufficiently powerful enough weapon could overcome those limits, possibly even with a single shot.
I think the question is would a shot from the Death Star, after completely depleting the cube’s shields, hit the cube at full power? Or would the shield have “absorbed” enough of the hit that the cube might survive? Or does the shield perhaps completely nullify a single shot, even if it is depleted by doing so?
It raises the question of how the Borg shield adaptation technology works. Its always shown as previously highly effective shots suddenly having “no effect.”
The fights we see with the federation have them constantly modifying their phaser output frequencies to work around that, but even then its a losing game, as the borg adapt to their modification formula.
Even the future Janeway’s super torpedoes run into this. And they were specifically designed to work around the adaptation mechanic.
I think it blows up one cube, damages a second, then no effect from then on.
The Borg cube is 3km wide, the Death Star is as big as a moon, so in the ballpark of 1000km in radius. There is just no way a Borg Cube’s technology is so advanced it can absorb energy to make up for that size difference. Unless you are a planet sized object, the death star delivers an infinite amount of energy.
Oh. This just opened up a terrifying thought. The Borg would take one look and go, “Shit, we need one of those.” And then we’ll eventually have a Borg giga-cube on our hands.
Could be from scratch, could be from amalgamating all their other cubes. Either way, terrifying.It’s specifically the size of a small moon, remember that the Earth’s moon is actually pretty large, 5th largest in our solar system and by a pretty good margin the largest in comparison to the planet it orbits, just in our own solar system we have Deimos at only about 6KM, and in other parts of the universe I’m sure they could be even smaller, in our own solar system Jupiter pretty regularly captures small asteroids into its orbit that could be considered temporary moons.
From the various wikis and such, the death stars were about 120 (1st death star) and 160 (2nd) km in diameter, so 60 and 80 in radius, so still significantly larger than a cube, but far less so than the 1000km you’re thinking.
And size doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much power they have at their disposal or how much they can absorb/deflect. Their weapons/shields are probably based on very different technologies, it could be like comparing a Davy Crockett nuke (basically the real-life equivalent of a fallout mini nuke) to an equivalent sized bomb made of black powder, or like an inch thick plate of steel to the same sized sheet of plywood.
And the death star crew was much larger, somewhere around 2 million people plus a few hundred thousand maintenance droids. Those humans need a lot more space and creature comforts than the Borg who just need alcoves to recharge in. I’m sure that they weren’t exactly providing luxury accomodations for most of the rank-and-file grunts and contractors and such, but they certainly got more space than the Borg need, plus dining halls, kitchens, medical bays, recreation areas, meeting rooms, offices, throne rooms, detention levels, etc. a lot of things the Borg have little or no use for. The Borg may be able to dedicate more space on the cube to weapons and shields than the death star could.
Would the Death Star weapon be described as a laser weapon? Because IIRC canonically in the Trek universe, lasers are a very weak outdated weapons technology, easily blocked with modern shielding tech.
No, because they don’t behave like lasers (like, they don’t move at the speed of light). They’re more like massive, short lived light sabers, which are plasma within a forcefield.
Star Wars does make the laser / blaster bolt distinction like Star Trek makes the laser / phaser distinction.
But it also calls it the “main Death Star laser”. Which is probably just a holdover from before a lot of that got hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars stuff. But would also require some retcon backflips to make it “not a laser”.
Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t realise SW made that distinction like ST does. When you say “hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars”, is “new” referring to post-Menace, or post-Awakens? Because I don’t remember the prequels and Clone Wars incorporating a distinction between laser and blaster, but I may just be failing to remember it.
Mostly meant the current Disney canon, which IIRC is all the live action movies, and the shows/books/etc made after the Clone Wars cartoon.
I don’t think it shows up a lot, but every once in awhile one author or another will find out about it and use it as a plot point. The reference that comes to mind is one of the really old books (want to say Splinter of the Mind’s Eye?) making a distinction that the ‘ancient’ security droids they run across at one point use lasers. I think it comes up in some of the 90s games like Dark Forces too. Probably some comics. I think like “regular” guns (slugthrowers in SW) they’re mostly filed under “weird” weapons the occasional bad guy will use to try and counter lightsabers.
Don’t really know if it shows up in the Disney stuff. They’re pretty scattershot with what is/isn’t canon from the pre-Disney EU.
Clearly the proper solution is to cut the baby in half.
