Anti-Borg technology and tactics

[Hando]

I know that the Borg threat is gone, but there could still be hidden pockets somewhere, or some Cube is thrown into the future from the past, and also they are gone only from ?one timeline/universe and there are still many other. So the Borg could make a comeback.

I would therefor like to ask, what techniques the Federation could have come up with to defend herself from the Borg menace.

These are some that came to my mind, but I would like to hear not only some feedback, but also different ones...

1. Quantity
Some 40 ships (depends on the year) are still not equal to 1 Borg Cube, but could 100+, 200+, ... ships fare better?

2. Hide in plain sight
Similarly as in Stargate Atlantis, if they just do not use advanced technology, will the Borg leave them in peace?

3. Trojan horse
As seen in Icheb or Future Janeway, if the whole species would get "inoculated", would the Borg be still able to adapt, if they are always destroyed after an assimilation attempt?
This could also include genetic engineering to get humans similar abilities/immunity to Denobulans or Species 8472 (although there are some 3 timelines, where the Borg were able to assimilate Species 8472).

4. Nadion-pulse cannon
A novelverse invention with bugs, but could they have been used against the Borg with effect, or would the Borg still adapt?

5. Aldean repulsor beam
The Federation could have sent humanitarian help and technicians to Aldea, they could have learned of this technology. In the regular setting, it could at least throw an approaching Cube away, in the full setting perhaps even destroy the ship.

6. Minosian Echo Papa 607
Would this drone be any use against the Borg?

7. Mentharian Aceton assimilator
Would these be of any use?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I know that the Borg threat is gone...

Only if you believe Voyager, which is NEVER a good idea.

It depends on which version of the Borg you're talking about, though. The Borg as originally conceived aren't that much of a problem; they come and go like sharks in the water, assimilate a few of your colonies and ships whenever they get "hungry" for new resources. If you catch them off guard you can probably kill them, but if they see you first, your only chance is to run like hell and try to find a place to hide until they get bored and look for easier prey.

If it's the First Contact/Voyager version of the Borg, all you really have to do is locate the Borg Queen and pull off some kind of Bugs Bunny routine. In fact, since her level of ineptitude is and has always been widely distributed throughout the Borg Collective, you might not even need to locate the Queen. Just beam a hundred torpedoes onto their ship and blow them all up before they can think to stop you.

I would therefor like to ask, what techniques the Federation could have come up with to defend herself from the Borg menace.

Stick with what works, I always say.

1. Quantity
Some 40 ships (depends on the year) are still not equal to 1 Borg Cube, but could 100+, 200+, ... ships fare better?

Only if at least of them is commanded by someone with names like "Picard" or "Sisko" or, hell, even "Janeway."

2. Hide in plain sight
Similarly as in Stargate Atlantis...

Invoking anything from Stargate is even more misguided than taking Voyager seriously.

But strictly speaking, no, that wouldn't work. If you're dealing with First Contact Borg, their motivations are so seethingly incoherent that you're likely to find yourself under attack by borgified sharks with frickin laser beams attached to their heads. The original Q-Who Borg are a different matter, but the only real way to avoid them is to kill them before they kill you.

3. Trojan horse
As seen in Icheb or Future Janeway, if the whole species would get "inoculated", would the Borg be still able to adapt, if they are always destroyed after an assimilation attempt?

Icheb wasn't the first time they tried this, actually. Picard's crew did the same thing with Hugh and his infectious "individuality." It turns out that any particular pathogen introduced to the collective will only spread as far as a single cube, so even if you could produce some kind of Borg plague and make your people carry it, you would only be able to get a couple of cubes before they adapted.

4. Nadion-pulse cannon
A novelverse invention with bugs, but could they have been used against the Borg with effect, or would the Borg still adapt?

That question is equally valid for literally ANY new technobabble weapon you might want to make up. Yes, the Borg will eventually adapt to it, and then you'll have to develop the antihadronic torpedo. When the Borg adapt to THAT, you'll have to develop the meson-pulse wave cannon, until the Borg adapt to that, ad nauseum.

Still, it kinda depends on which version of the Borg we're talking about. Generally speaking, they don't adapt to weapons on the first use, so if you can destroy whole cubes with one shot it'll probably take them a while to figure out what you're using on them.

6. Minosian Echo Papa 607
Would this drone be any use against the Borg?

Interesting question. They're both annoyingly adaptable and they're both driven by relentless machine intelligence. My guess is that they would enter into a rapidly escalating techno-arms race over the course of a few hours that would culminate in their annihilating each other and everything within a million kilometers of the battle zone.

7. Mentharian Aceton assimilator
Would these be of any use?

Dobutful. Starfleet got out of them easily enough, the Borg would probably figure it out eventually.

 

[SWHouston]

I believe the only way to defeat he Borg is from within.
Sprinkle a few NanoProbes on their Ships, instruct them to disable given systems, then "attempt" to reestablish the personnel back into their cultures. Or, send them to Hugh's planet to live out their existence.

 

[Johnny]

I believe the only way to defeat he Borg is from within.
Sprinkle a few NanoProbes on their Ships, instruct them to disable given systems, then "attempt" to reestablish the personnel back into their cultures. Or, send them to Hugh's planet to live out their existence.

It's always bothered me that you either saw a borg cube that was indestructible or one that fell apart when you threw croutons at it.

There's no point bringing them back unless they're going to be s**t-scary! Ship fired forward in time seems ok, but you're opening yourself up to lots of future planning. I'd go for a few stray nano-cells floating in space or on a planet that finds a nice limb to bond with and all hell breaks loose.

 

[SWHouston]

There's no point bringing them back unless they're going to be s**t-scary!

Their continuing threat could certainly offer any number of literary avenues, but, I rather enjoyed the fellowship which was established with Hugh and his Group. Androids may be in short supply, but you could have a Borg on every Fed Ship.

But then, they'd have to make 7/9 an Admiral.

 

[Sandoval]

People posting pictures of tommy-guns and hailing these as the answer to combat the Borg always make me laugh. How stupid can you be?

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun, not because some weapon from the 1920s is the holy-grail to defeating Borg drones.

You can't mow down hundreds of drones with them time after time because they adapt, just like how phasers work for a while.

Surely anyone with working brain can understand that?

 

[Timo]

Indeed, "sticking to that which works" is the one thing guaranteed not to work with the Borg...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sandoval]

"Stick with what works" - literally the stupidest tactic ever devised to deal with the Borg Collective.

 

[publiusr]

The TOS teck might be good. If I were to fight the borg, I would want these items
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Scalosian_water
I want their instantaneous weapons as well

The weapons used by these folks to knock out a whole ship
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Sigma_Draconis_VI
The Tantalus device
And the Kelvin belt to turn borg drones into cubes.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun, not because some weapon from the 1920s is the holy-grail to defeating Borg drones.

That's kinda my point. Doesn't take a lot of fancy high tech weapons or tactics to defeat the Borg; they are vulnerable to just about anything they've never seen before. If they adapt to machineguns and/or projectiles, you hit them with flamethrowers; they adapt to flamethrowers, hit them with poison darts. They adapt to poison darts, hit them with phasers. They adapt to phasers,switch back to machineguns.

The Borg are many things, but they are not overly clever. They adapt to what you are doing, but they rarely try to predict your next move.

 

[Silanda]

People posting pictures of tommy-guns and hailing these as the answer to combat the Borg always make me laugh. How stupid can you be?

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun, not because some weapon from the 1920s is the holy-grail to defeating Borg drones.

You can't mow down hundreds of drones with them time after time because they adapt, just like how phasers work for a while.

Surely anyone with working brain can understand that?

The thing that's always bugged me about that line of thought is that it's somewhat hard to believe that not once, in all the worlds they have assimilated, have they encountered simple slug throwers. A bullet is a bullet is a bullet, they shouldn't have to adapt to every specific type of gun. They're also vulnerable to direct physical assault.

Is there an example in all of Trek where the Borg have adapted to attack by a weapon that is not energy based?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

People posting pictures of tommy-guns and hailing these as the answer to combat the Borg always make me laugh. How stupid can you be?

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun, not because some weapon from the 1920s is the holy-grail to defeating Borg drones.

You can't mow down hundreds of drones with them time after time because they adapt, just like how phasers work for a while.

Surely anyone with working brain can understand that?

The thing that's always bugged me about that line of thought is that it's somewhat hard to believe that not once, in all the worlds they have assimilated, have they encountered simple slug throwers. A bullet is a bullet is a bullet, they shouldn't have to adapt to every specific type of gun. They're also vulnerable to direct physical assault.

Is there an example in all of Trek where the Borg have adapted to attack by a weapon that is not energy based?

No, and in fact several times we see Starfleet officers resorting to fisticuffs when their phasers stop working. The problem isn't so much that the Borg "adapt" to physical attacks so much as Starfleet officers suck at hand-to-hand combat. Otherwise, we see Worf make short work of one with a sword and beats another one to death with the phaser rifle it had just adapted to. Data, also, kills one by snapping its neck and later -- after being captured by the Queen -- punches his way through a roomful of Borg until one of them scratches him with its claw and he gets all wussy about it.

That, plus the fact that Borg drones are both very slow moving and inexplicably lack ranged weapons of any kind, means that you could probably kill every last one of them just by equipping your security department with long pointy sticks and/or swords.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

People posting pictures of tommy-guns and hailing these as the answer to combat the Borg always make me laugh. How stupid can you be?

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun, not because some weapon from the 1920s is the holy-grail to defeating Borg drones.

You can't mow down hundreds of drones with them time after time because they adapt, just like how phasers work for a while.

Surely anyone with working brain can understand that?

The thing that's always bugged me about that line of thought is that it's somewhat hard to believe that not once, in all the worlds they have assimilated, have they encountered simple slug throwers. A bullet is a bullet is a bullet, they shouldn't have to adapt to every specific type of gun. They're also vulnerable to direct physical assault.

Is there an example in all of Trek where the Borg have adapted to attack by a weapon that is not energy based?

The tommy gun in the holodeck was probably a hologram of the photons and forcefields variety, rather than having been actual replicated matter. Picard says "I disengaged the safety protocols. Without them even a holographic bullet can kill."

FWIW, someone's probably tried to fight the Borg with slug throwers, but nobody ever tried weaponized forcefields until Picard swiss-cheesed Ensign Lynch with a toy gun.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

FWIW, someone's probably tried to fight the Borg with slug throwers...

Which would be, if anything, considerably more deadly than their holographic counterparts, especially considering how much damage Worf was able to do with his knife (and Data with his bare hands).

 

[T'Girl]

Or no one had use holographic bullets (or just plain old bullets) on a Borg recently. The Borg personal body shield doesn't work against everything, just the last dozen things used against them, which is why Worf can assault a Borg with a metal cutting weapon and have it work.

In the entirety of Borg history, while raiding some primitive planet for drones, no one ever used a knife or a sword on a Borg before?

Of course someone did, Worf's weapon worked because no one had used one that day.

The Borg shield can't do everything at the same time.

The tommy-gun worked because the Borg Collective had never been shot at with a tommy-gun ... Surely anyone with working brain can understand that?

Have a working brain and no, that makes absolutely no sense at all.

 

[Timo]

The weird thing about the Borg is that they virtually always let the first attack succeed - even when it is by an already definitely known method, such as a Starfleet hand phaser. They only adapt to the second attack, and that adaptation is successful regardless of the method.

There are one or two exceptions to that. In "Q Who?", the Borg don't allow even the first photon torpedo to succeed, say. But such things are extremely rare.

We might well deduce that the Borg not only don't mind losing a few Drones or a few cubic meters of their Cube to an attack - they want to be defeated that way. After all, such losses don't really cost them anything; VOY even implies that Drone souls are immortal and collectively stored, and Drone bodies thus are truly expendable even in the personal opinion of the body's former owner if anybody bothered to ask. Being lost to an enemy weapon is a victory for the Borg, as they will have learned new things about not just the weapon but the current tactics of the enemy.

The Collective can't afford to do that with photon torpedoes, though, because a single unopposed shot would vaporize their entire ship and preclude learning. So they let hand phaser shots and tommy-gun bullets get through, but not torpedoes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

I've got it covered:

http://www.inpayne.com/trekfanfic/wolfx.html
http://www.inpayne.com/trekfanfic/wolfdetails.html



Basically: A starship based on the Doomsday Machine. A kilometer-long tube that fires a concentrated antimatter particle beam. Let's see 'em adapt to THAT.

 

[Santaman]

Indeed, want to defeat the Borg then you simply need a cannon so strong that there's nothing to adapt which is one of the reasons I always thought that the Borg were total bullshit... explosion big enough = dead Borg.

 

[Timo]

...But how to create an explosion bigger than the ones the Borg have shrugged off so far? The main deflector of Starfleet's biggest and baddest ship, presumably her most powerful weapon even in theory, failed to make a dent.

Anyway, if technology overwhelms the Borg, they can always adapt in terms of tactics. A weapon strong enough to annihilate Cubes with one shot? Just send a thousand Cubes! Or fire first.

Really, there's no future to devising stronger and stronger weapons, as this only makes the Borg stronger. What one needs is a weapon that kills with one shot, yes - but also a means of ensuring that the Borg gain no information from this kill. Basically, a whopping big death ray that also emits a jamming field (say, Nero's drill ramped up thousandfold) to cut off communications with the rest of the Collective should offer a chance of success.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[R. Star]

Nah, the Borg suffered from the inevitable water down effect... they were scary and almost unstoppable at first, but once they started showing up regularly in Voyager they basically became more and more dumb so that the good guys could keep beating them. So yeah, they basically had already lost their menace even before Endgame.