What would have been Locutus role if Starfleet capitulated to the Borg?

[Unimatrix Q]

And how would the Borg have organized the assimilation of Earth, if, as in the original concept, Nanopropes don't exist and only surgical implantation was possible?

How exactly would the process have gone on Earth and what would have happened during the first weeks in the smaller towns and villages, as i guess the Borg wouldn't have had enough drones to bother with the people living there?

 

[F. King Daniel]

And how would the Borg have organized the assimilation of Earth, if, as in the original concept, Nanopropes don't exist and only surgical implantation was possible?

How exactly would the process have gone on Earth and what would have happened during the first weeks in the smaller towns and villages, as i guess the Borg wouldn't have had enough drones to bother with the people living there?

There was a comic called "Worst of Both Worlds" about an AU where we lost and Locutus converted Starfleet HQ to an assimilation facility and humans were being rounded up and taken there.

 

[Prax]

I thought Picard was injected with some kind of nanotechnology.

 

[Qonundrum]

^^We saw the egg whisk and cat laser pointer grafted onto him on screen, but that a large stick with glowing bulb thing having a look inside his ear or drilling behind it or whatever... nanotechnology for the Borg may have been in a limited state.

I think King Daniel Beyond's response pretty much nails it. The comic's description read a lot like "V: The Final Battle" where humans were corralled and sent to a food processing center for more efficient processing. Though is it better to be a someone's drone or someone's dinner? :9

 

[at Quark's]

Wouldn't it go at an exponential rate though ?

You know, after a day the drone population is (say) doubled, the day after that it is doubled again because all new drones help too, and so on ....

 

[Herbert]

Starfleet would never have capitulated to the Borg.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Starfleet would never have capitulated to the Borg.

They could very well have lost to the Borg though if they sent, say, more than one cube in BOBW.

 

[Timo]

I thought Picard was injected with some kind of nanotechnology.

Well, an injection turned him grey. What else is there to it?

...In any case, there's still a transceiver inside him as late as ST:FC. Probably "nano", or even Beverly Crusher would have spotted it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[at Quark's]

Starfleet would never have capitulated to the Borg.

Perhaps not, but that would have been irrelevant, with the Borg forces being as completely superior as shown in BOBW (except of course for their Achilles heel which needed to be there because TNG otherwise simply would have ended).

 

[saladdays]

I thought Picard was injected with some kind of nanotechnology.

I don't recall him actually being injected with anything, but it's not hard to surmise that they used some type of nanotechnology on him (although not anywhere to the extent that was used on regular drones), knowing that they do in fact use it.

Assuming we didn't see any injection here, at what point did we start routinely seeing the Borg inject nanotechnology? Was it First Contact?

 

[Prax]

I don't recall him actually being injected with anything, but it's not hard to surmise that they used some type of nanotechnology on him (although not anywhere to the extent that was used on regular drones), knowing that they do in fact use it.

Assuming we didn't see any injection here, at what point did we start routinely seeing the Borg inject nanotechnology? Was it First Contact?

Maybe we don't, but I would assume it's a necessary part of assimilation. They do talk about nanotechnology in the TNG borg episodes.

Yes, after First Contact, the Borg have those things come out of their hands.
"Don't let them touch you!"

 

[Timo]

Picard was assimilated in stages. Initially, he's merely captured, the Drone apparently using a sedative on him, although this could also be a mild dose of nanoprobes, like so often used by Seven of Nine. He's then civilly interviewed, much like Janeway usually was; no skin changes yet. We then see him partially augmented but still pink-skinned, and now seemingly docile. And when the attempt to extract him fails, the next episode has him attached to a table, receiving his mechanical hand, while a long needle is used to turn his skin all grey, starting with the head.

I guess this is yer standard nanoprobe tubule, two-pronged and all, only of a variant used at the agumentation surgery stations rather than out in the field. Not handheld, I mean.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Prax]

If they were going to augment his arm with that mechanical thing, why didn't they remove his hand? Why does he even need those tools if his job is to act as the borg emissary?

 

[saladdays]

If they were going to augment his arm with that mechanical thing, why didn't they remove his hand? Why does he even need those tools if his job is to act as the borg emissary?

Maybe nothing, but perhaps he still could have used those tools for something, even with being an emissary.

 

[Timo]

We have seldom heard of Drones with specialist physical features. "Dark Frontier" has the Doctor refer to "a medical repair Drone" with a special type of "servo-armature" full of medical doodads; apart from that, Drones appear to be fully generic, even when the Hansens are seen carefully categorizing them. And when the Collective chooses a spokesDrone in "Scorpion", they go for a generic one - the flip side of the Locutus thing where they create an apparently equally generic spokesDrone from scratch.

Did Picard get to retain his hand? The initial plan was to show him getting a blatant replacement at the end of "Best of Both Worlds II", with visible seams and all, to imply that the original hand had been cut off in the previous episode. They skipped showing that, but of course "Paper Moon" later establishes that UFP-standard replacement limbs don't have seams... The scene in which the armature is mounted on his right arm was to have been shot so that we don't see whether the original hand has been sawed off or not, but this didn't happen, either. Yet later the mechanical arm is broken off - does Picard lose his biological hand there or not? There's no real telling.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Prax]

Why is the drone in scorpion generic, because she doesn't have cool arm tools?

 

[Timo]

Generic in the sense that every Borg has a different tool arm - Seven of Nine's minimalistic model doesn't appear to convey any particular special functionality in comparison with, say, the massive claw of Two of Nine.

Alternately we can argue that every Drone is special (this has to be done with the Ralph Wiggum voice) because every arm is. We can then decide whether Locutus and Seven were intended for different tasks, or whether Seven's teeny weeny glove perhaps was intended to mount a more versatile end effector as needed, the way Locutus' fit over Picard's intact hand.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mojochi]

If they were going to augment his arm with that mechanical thing, why didn't they remove his hand?

If they didn't, it's probably because amputation of a living body's appendage is quite a lot of potentially hazardous & unnecessary work? I'm surmising here, but I'd think removing healthy/usable organs/appendages might not be optimal practice for them, if they could work around it, without limitation. If it ain't broke, why break it?

Why does he even need those tools if his job is to act as the borg emissary?

Does he not use it to defend himself? Isn't that reason enough? and even in his role as some kind of mouthpiece, he might be called on to board a ship, access/assault systems, etc...

 

[Unicron]

There was a comic called "Worst of Both Worlds" about an AU where we lost and Locutus converted Starfleet HQ to an assimilation facility and humans were being rounded up and taken there.

Yep, and there's another comic in an alternate future where the Borg have assimilated most of the galaxy. Basically the Borg Queen tricked Picard into helping the Collective against an alien race that was apparently damaging them worse than Species 8472, and convincing him that becoming Locutus again was the only way to save both the Collective and the Federation. But the aliens were already under Borg control, and within a century or so Locutus had defeated the Federation.

Then he kind of got bored and decided the Borg idea of perfection wasn't ideal, so he Data back in time to prevent the Queen from succeeding. And the future, re-Borged version of Seven got a scorpion body. I'm not making this up, seriously.

 

[Timo]

If they didn't, it's probably because amputation of a living body's appendage is quite a lot of potentially hazardous & unnecessary work? I'm surmising here, but I'd think removing healthy/usable organs/appendages might not be optimal practice for them, if they could work around it, without limitation. If it ain't broke, why break it?

Fair enough. But they did explicitly gouge out Seven's left eye in order to fit the ocular implant. That wasn't done on Locutus (yet?), and one would think the implant could have been hooked onto a "bypass" setup like LaForge's VISOR sockets just as well.

Or did little Annika manage to stab herself in the eye at the last minute, necessitating the replacement, which then turned into an improvement?

Timo Saloniemi