General Empire vs Borg musings

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Lord Revan
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Lord Revan »

the Dreadnaught was huge for an unmanned ship, I'd say based on it's relative size compared to Voyager it's at least as big as a Runabout if not bigger.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Q99 wrote: And you again just pulled 'decades' out of no-where. Based on you thinking that's how fast *Romans* would do it. Really now! You are actually, literally arguing that 'because it takes early iron age people this long to advance even with help, it will take equally long for a species that can construct industrial items and machine tools in seconds.'
Well now that certainly explains a few things. Replicators have never demonstrated anywhere near the capabilities you are ascribing to them here. The Bajorians didn't rebuild their planet in a few hours with the industrial grade replicator the Federation gave them. The Cardasians didn't rebuild their losses to the Klingons in a few days with the 3 industrial replicators the Federation gave them. The Federation didn't spam ships after their losses in "First Contact" despite the Dominion threat. The Borg were not churning out fleets of ships to oppose Not-the-Vorlons. (species 8472)

Replicators require raw materials and power to function. They are tools of convenience that are overall inferior to proper manufacturing techniques. (Just like modern 3D printers are great for prototyping plastic objects but we still use injection molding for mass producing finished product. It is faster, cheaper, and higher quality.) Replicators do not allow you to ignore the logistics chain.
Q99 wrote: The Borg output is not simply their direct production but also what they can *steal*, literally taking ships and worlds and transferring them to their control. And, once they have Wars tech, they will be incorporating Wars industrial methods in addition to replicators and particle synthesis. Heck, particle synthesis is a recent acquisition of theirs, their industrial output literally improved mid-show.
Yet we have multiple examples of minor Trek powers far below the level of Wars holding off the Borg.
Q99 wrote: Also, translating the Death Star's mass directly to ships is... not really accurate itself. Even at peak militarization they never make ships that fast, ships have a lot of needs that ship-sized bit of DS interior do not. Each ship requires an engine, computer, thrusters, guns, and etc. etc. which just-more-death-star-corridors does not.
The Death Star has weapons, power generation, hyperdrive, etc. scaled up to its size which still requires the rare and/or exotic materials. The Borg don't actually have 10 million full cubes either.
Q99 wrote: We also now know even the second death star construction took a really long time, right after AHN and the first's destruction the second looked almost as it does in RotJ.
Where is that from?
Q99 wrote: It also notes phasers have a chain reaction component which may make them more powerful than raw output, and Photon Torpedoes are noted to be in the 64 megaton range.
Yes a chain reaction that gets less powerful the more dense and strong the material being hit is. 64 megatons is the theoretical maximum assuming the torpedo doesn't need to use any of its fuel to get where it is going.
Q99 wrote: Cherrypicking to neatly sidestep arguments that contradict your point noted... again.
Right back at you.
Q99 wrote:
Lord Insanity wrote: In "Best of Both Worlds" we saw the Ent-D rotating its phaser frequencies and the beam was cycling through the whole rainbow. In "First Contact" everyone was firing standard orange. It is more likely they were simply overwhelming the adaption effect with raw power. This would indicate phasers are not 100% entirely frequency based. Which both makes sense and is better anyway.
They've talked a lot about new technologies to counter the borg, from new phaser frequencies to plasma phasers and pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes and so on, so, no, we know it was not simply the same ol' with more power.

And no, them just using raw power doesn't make sense, not with how we know Borg adaptation works and all the advancements we see in the field in DS9 and such. What'd be convenient for you doesn't equal more sense or better.
More power as in more ships attacking together. Trying to play the frequency game is playing right into the Borg's strengths. Simply overwhelming and wearing them down with sustained fire is exploiting their weakness.
Shroom Man 777 wrote: Do you have a clip of the Enterprise phasers going full rainbow? I want to see that, it sounds so cool.
Here is a clip from "Best of Both Worlds" Jump to about the 3 minute mark. The DVD very clearly shows a quickly rotating rainbow effect. (The whole beam is only one color at any given time but the whole beam color shifts rapidly.) This video mostly shows that at first then becomes crap due to compression artifacts.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Lord Insanity wrote: Well now that certainly explains a few things. Replicators have never demonstrated anywhere near the capabilities you are ascribing to them here.
Drones in the episode "Regeneration" converted an Enterprise-era transport to a larger ship with significantly enhanced capability in three days. Despite not even having their own ships or a replicator, just nanites, they were able to convert a quite primitive ship that much in very short order.

A Borg ship visibly replace large amounts of structure in short order in their first appearance, Q Who, every single Borg cube has significant industrial capacity (before the obtaining of Particle Synthesis technology). Sure, resources are used (as we saw in FC where after long combat the Cube was having fluctuations in it's power grid from doing so much), but we are literally taking about a side that has both large-scale resources and is, in this scenario, going around assimilating resources. Mentioning it takes resources is not a counter-argument to them being able to build and refit themselves.

Every single Cube, in short, has industrial capacity of note, and so do minor ships for that matter, though of slower scale. If they took a month to rework themselves completely, I would be impressed with the complexity of the task. Days to refit a Cube seems quite in line with what we've seen, but of course the more sizable the upgrade, the longer it will take as they'd have to go through intermediate steps.

We also saw Borg nanites on their own upgrade to 29th century tech with just a sample of 29th century tech, doing so pretty much overnight.

You're asserting it takes them decades to upgrade, and doesn't fit with their shown capabilities in terms of either build capcity or observed past upgrade times. Pulling 'decades' out of thin air is not a convincing argument- once again, you're presenting an assumption pulled out of thin air as solid despite actually not presenting reasoning for that argument outside of 'Romans', while I am noting .

Oh hey, for that matter, we have seen the Voyager upgrade itself, as a Federation ship on it's lonesome, over the course of the series. They made themselves a brand new Slipstream drive that worked (but don't use it because it's too dangerous), they gave it multiple enhancements thanks to Seven's input including more efficient power couplings, enhanced sensors, etc.. Finally, with Future Janeway's design specs, they built an ablative armor system using only on-ship production, showing a lot on what a single ship's production capacity can do.

A lone ship with Replicators was able to build notable improvements based on obtaining better information, and here we're talking about a full industrial power with a thousand worlds, million of ships, and an unknown number of large space stations, working together, with not just replicators but nanites and particle synthesis, with known-faster production power than Voyager.
The Bajorians didn't rebuild their planet in a few hours with the industrial grade replicator the Federation gave them.
Nope, but right after those came online you can be sure they were making parts, and don't think I didn't notice you shifting goalposts here from discussing whether Replicators can be used to start the chain of upgrading in a reasonable timeframe, to a handful producing a planetary infrastructure. Not that there is anything indicating the production of that planetary infrastructure will take so long either.

Insisting that a forge that has limited capacity and makes stuff physically slowly, is equivalent to a chain of upgrade and a wide scale much more industrialized infrastructure (and in Industry, the Borg blow the Federation out of the water) *in terms of speed*, where every ship has known significant on-screen industrial capacity and each ship only needs to upgrade one ship, is not an honest debate tactic. Indeed, there's nothing putting replicators on the same time scale as traditional forges, to the point where I'm not sure why you're even trying to argue that.


The Federation fleet was shown to be increasingly made of new model ships as one goes down the timeline, so, yes, they were producing ships in large number, and it wasn't taking decades, and Voyager, just a few years separate from the Federation, were pretty shocked by the capabilities of the Prometheus ("This is a Federation Starship??" -the Doctor). The Borg, we are not informed what their production response to 8472 is one way or another. You're simply assuming there's not heavy production going on but you don't have any evidence to back it up.

Just because you assume something is the case doesn't mean it's true if you can't back it up, and you haven't been. Note how I've been pointed to example when the Borg or other Trek powers they've assimilated from have done examples that are out of line with your assertions- evidence beats assertion.
Replicators require raw materials and power to function. They are tools of convenience that are overall inferior to proper manufacturing techniques. (Just like modern 3D printers are great for prototyping plastic objects but we still use injection molding for mass producing finished product. It is faster, cheaper, and higher quality.) Replicators do not allow you to ignore the logistics chain.
Replicators are part of the logistics chain and used in industrial processes- they aren't inferior products in terms of tensile strength or so on, the main complaint tends to be *taste* of food, everyone uses replicators to make ships (how the Voyager made the Delta Flyer, for example) and has even been used to produce future-federation tech when given the specs (Ablative armor, transphasic torpedoes). Additionally, Borg have nanites and particle synthesis (which is notable for being much more precise than replicators)... which you're neatly brushing aside. Plus observed capabilities in excess of what you're asserting, we have seen them build fast after all.
Yet we have multiple examples of minor Trek powers far below the level of Wars holding off the Borg.
You do know we have not seen the Borg go all-out on any species save 8472, right? They have literally sent all of 2 ships to the Federation. We saw in Scorpion them take another species with 2. Species 116, one of the more advanced conventional powers with Slipstream and Particle Synthesis, held them off for some time... but when the Borg finally nailed down their location they took them out in literally hours with literally 0.01% of their forces.

Sure, if the Borg were merely trying to assimilate the Empire with a ship or two at a time they could be held off indefinitely, but that's hardly the scenario, is it?

And 8472, unlike the Empire, did not have lots of small under-defended planets to take. The Borg a year into a war with the Empire will be in a very different position than they are at start because they will be assimilating worlds and ships.

The fact that the Borg will assimilate ships and territory has been heavily discussed, you are lagging multiple pages behind the discussion.
The Death Star has weapons, power generation, hyperdrive, etc. scaled up to its size which still requires the rare and/or exotic materials. The Borg don't actually have 10 million full cubes either.
Sure, the Death Star does have some exotic stuff, but it's still not near the ratio to directly convert size to ships. And the Borg do have millions of ships of various size, many of whom are cubes, and they also have space stations with populations in the trillions.

The Second Death Star being well under construction is in the Darth Vader comic, Vader is assigned to it right after A New Hope and it doesn't look all that much different.
Yes a chain reaction that gets less powerful the more dense and strong the material being hit is. 64 megatons is the theoretical maximum assuming the torpedo doesn't need to use any of its fuel to get where it is going.
Using anti-matter as fuel (it's actually projected out at speed too, we know the launchers are actually launchers) to accelerate something so small does not use a lot of anti-matter. If it's acceleration is completely self-powered, that'd leave it wit, what, 63.9 megatons? Over 60 to be sure.
More power as in more ships attacking together. Trying to play the frequency game is playing right into the Borg's strengths. Simply overwhelming and wearing them down with sustained fire is exploiting their weakness.
You do know that's not what the main page you've linked to said, right? Also, that's not a 'weakness' in any sense of the word. Just trying to overwhelm someone in their strong point set up to make the defenses as efficient as possible can possibly work with enough power, but it is also literally the most inefficient way of doing so.

Hitting them with a wide variety of frequencies focuses them to spread out their adaptation is much more sensible, it makes it so they can't just maximize adaptation to what you're throwing and means that less total power is needed to ultimately break through. We know the Federation has researched new phaser frequencies in order to fight the Borg, so you're going to need more evidence if your assertion is they ditched all that and just decided to use the same frequences and counting on just firing a lot.
Here is a clip from "Best of Both Worlds" Jump to about the 3 minute mark. The DVD very clearly shows a quickly rotating rainbow effect. (The whole beam is only one color at any given time but the whole beam color shifts rapidly.) This video mostly shows that at first then becomes crap due to compression artifacts.
Oh hey, there's a green, and a blue-orange altering beam we see a few times. Much better than the clip I found to be sure, you can see the color! Still not what I'd call full rainbow, and note how some of the alternate frequencies are still orange. So we can conclude alternate frequencies sometimes change the color, sometimes not, and all in all we've still only see three appearances.

You know, it's weird to see you bring in any evidence that supports your point, if not solidly proving it. Most of the time you either assert stuff or post a link to the main page which supports mine.
Right back at you.
I specifically noted the problems with your Roman and similar arguments in depth from the moment you brought them up, and am pointing out specifically what you've skipped and are still skipping in arguments. You finally responded to my 'speed of upgrade' talk for the first time last post (note: This is an 8 page thread), and in doing so you still left out two of the main facets of their industry that I've mentioned a half-dozen times each and did not support where you got your timeframe from. Sorry, but "no, you're cherry picking," doesn't work.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Also, here's a thought- Time Travel via sphere.

Now, in Star Wars that's not the greatest strategy since go back a couple millennia just gets you plopped down in the Great Galactic War or similar without even the Borg's infrastructure, but... imagine if the Borg looked through a history book and landed in the New Sith Wars, towards the end.

The Republic's withdrawn, the Sith are fragmented, the hypernet is down, the technological base is fragmented. They'd have to start with a mere Sphere, but weak worlds shouldn't be too hard to find considering the devastation, and then they can go eat the Sith kingdoms of warlords who are on the verge of collapse- and if by traveling around they reconstruct something resembling the normal SW technological level that'd put them ahead of the game, and importantly no-one will even be calling out to report a pattern of attacks since the means of doing that is gone.

"X world has been wiped out," is not something that draws attention during the New Sith Wars.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Q99 wrote: The Second Death Star being well under construction is in the Darth Vader comic, Vader is assigned to it right after A New Hope and it doesn't look all that much different.
Wait the new canon changed that? Why didn't you just point that out in the first place then? That changes everything. The entirety of my main point is that the Borg would be hard pressed to make up the commanding industrial lead the Empire has over them. If the Empire doesn't have that massive lead then your assumptions on the overall scenario are right and mine are wrong.

So apparently our whole exchange boils down to: I assumed we all "knew" the Empire had a commanding industrial lead and couldn't figure out why you thought (by comparison) slow replicators, nanites, and particle synthesis would make a significant difference. You assumed we all "knew" the Empire doesn't have that much of an industrial edge and couldn't figure out why I was ignoring relatively fast techs like replicators, nanites, and particle synthesis. It's kind of funny actually.
Q99 wrote: Using anti-matter as fuel (it's actually projected out at speed too, we know the launchers are actually launchers) to accelerate something so small does not use a lot of anti-matter. If it's acceleration is completely self-powered, that'd leave it wit, what, 63.9 megatons? Over 60 to be sure.
Torpedoes self maneuver and if fired at warp must maintain their warp field. Also anti-matter annihilation is not 100% efficient. The main page states ~24 MT for a direct hit.
Q99 wrote: Hitting them with a wide variety of frequencies focuses them to spread out their adaptation is much more sensible, it makes it so they can't just maximize adaptation to what you're throwing and means that less total power is needed to ultimately break through. We know the Federation has researched new phaser frequencies in order to fight the Borg, so you're going to need more evidence if your assertion is they ditched all that and just decided to use the same frequences and counting on just firing a lot.
Yet we clearly see in "First Contact" that unlike "Best of Both Worlds" they are not noticeably changing frequencies. If they were bothering to rotate frequencies why would they restrict themselves to just the "orange" range?
Q99 wrote:
Lord Insanity wrote:Here is a clip from "Best of Both Worlds" Jump to about the 3 minute mark. The DVD very clearly shows a quickly rotating rainbow effect. (The whole beam is only one color at any given time but the whole beam color shifts rapidly.) This video mostly shows that at first then becomes crap due to compression artifacts.
Oh hey, there's a green, and a blue-orange altering beam we see a few times. Much better than the clip I found to be sure, you can see the color! Still not what I'd call full rainbow, and note how some of the alternate frequencies are still orange. So we can conclude alternate frequencies sometimes change the color, sometimes not, and all in all we've still only see three appearances.
I pointed out in the text you quoted that the bad quality of the video compression hides part of the effect. On the DVD we can clearly see the beam shifting through multiple colors.
Not like this:
R O Y G B I V @ 0.01seconds
Like this:
R R R @ 0.1s
O O O @ 0.2s
Y Y Y @ 0.3s
and so on but not in rainbow order, the colors were randomly shifting. The whole color segmented beam in that video is just a really weird compression error.

During the battle where they separate the saucer and rescue Piccard/Locutus we see the saucer section fire a different color each time too. In the SD to HD comparison video @ the 2:50 mark.
Q99 wrote:Also, here's a thought- Time Travel via sphere.

Now, in Star Wars that's not the greatest strategy since go back a couple millennia just gets you plopped down in the Great Galactic War or similar without even the Borg's infrastructure, but... imagine if the Borg looked through a history book and landed in the New Sith Wars, towards the end.

The Republic's withdrawn, the Sith are fragmented, the hypernet is down, the technological base is fragmented. They'd have to start with a mere Sphere, but weak worlds shouldn't be too hard to find considering the devastation, and then they can go eat the Sith kingdoms of warlords who are on the verge of collapse- and if by traveling around they reconstruct something resembling the normal SW technological level that'd put them ahead of the game, and importantly no-one will even be calling out to report a pattern of attacks since the means of doing that is gone.

"X world has been wiped out," is not something that draws attention during the New Sith Wars.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Here's a question, since the Rebel Alliance operates in the periphery, and in places that would be prime targets for the Borg, would they let these light targets be attacked, making the Empire weaker, or would they wish to intervene as they are basic do-gooders?

I'm very curious about the moral implications of a Galactic Empire fighting an existential war with the Borg, and what the Rebel Alliance leadership would decide to do under such a circumstance.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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I'm pretty sure a lot of Rebels would want to intervene- which is good for the Borg, because they have a lot of light but high quality forces.
Lord Insanity wrote: Wait the new canon changed that? Why didn't you just point that out in the first place then? That changes everything. The entirety of my main point is that the Borg would be hard pressed to make up the commanding industrial lead the Empire has over them. If the Empire doesn't have that massive lead then your assumptions on the overall scenario are right and mine are wrong.
Your main point has been forcing an analogy about Roman forges even when it's pointed out the multiple ways the analogy doesn't work, and you have repeatedly reiterated that because the Borg use 'Roman forges' they can't make SW tech even if they try and learn it with assimilation.

If your point on 'Roman Forges' and being unable to learn the tech was right, the difference in industry between making the DS2 fast or slow would not be a critical factor as they have a much larger base force to begin with, and still quite a considerable industry (the Deathstars were being constructed simultaneously in the new stuff, after all, in addition to normal ship production).
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by The Romulan Republic »

FaxModem1 wrote:Here's a question, since the Rebel Alliance operates in the periphery, and in places that would be prime targets for the Borg, would they let these light targets be attacked, making the Empire weaker, or would they wish to intervene as they are basic do-gooders?

I'm very curious about the moral implications of a Galactic Empire fighting an existential war with the Borg, and what the Rebel Alliance leadership would decide to do under such a circumstance.
I suspect that this is something that would cause considerable internal disagreement in the Alliance, as both sides have a valid argument- the need to protect people from the Borg, vs. the strategic advantages of letting your two powerful enemies weaken each other.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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The Romulan Republic wrote: I suspect that this is something that would cause considerable internal disagreement in the Alliance, as both sides have a valid argument- the need to protect people from the Borg, vs. the strategic advantages of letting your two powerful enemies weaken each other.
Also, they're, well, an Alliance. Their top-down power is not absolute and you could have some members go one way, others the other. What if the Bothans and Mon Cal disagree? (And I could see arguments for either going either way- the Bothans would have the best eyes on target. The Mon Cal are known for their altruism but also experienced more first-hand Empire slavery) Mon Mothma has sway but may not be able to command things too strongly.

Plus there's the risk of, "Does turning a blind eye to this cost us PR points?", which would figure in to their decisions.

I think if the Borg got really big they'd throw in against them because as bad as the Empire is, the Borg are more like a Galactic plague that can't be overthrown from within (the 'unimatrix zero' mutation notwithstanding, but that's small comfort when they'd hardly be in a position to technobabble it up), but throwing in with the Empire could be the end of the Alliance even if the Borg go down because Palpatine would never not use the situation to his advantage even when faced with an outside threat like the Borg (and with a PR tool like the Borg, he no longer needs the Alliance to exist as a PR stunt about 'we need to deal with dangerous rebels'). Sith deviousness could undermine unity even in the face of this because Sith simply won't stop planning a backstab 'once we've won.' Or 'once we're at a situation where we can kill you and still think we'll win, even if it delays victory/gives the enemy more of a chance.'

From the Alliance's standpoint, an ideal outcome is either the Empire deals with it relatively fast in a way that uses up resources without the galaxy being too afraid of the Borg (unlikely- Palpatine *will* milk every Borg atrocity and 'they're like Separatist Droids only they eat your families' for every propaganda point even if he's having great military success), or they try and take them out before the Empire does for the PR win (which given the number of Borg is pretty unlikely, even un-upgraded Borg is a long cleanup operation for a not-overly-huge Rebel Fleet. But if, say, they could blow up some Borg stations for PR purposes, maybe). A big long Borg war is bad for them on multiple fronts, either they don't join in and it undercuts them PR wise even if it helps them materially, or they do join in and use up their forces while Sidious takes advantage to figure out better ways to eliminate them and get people on the inside.

Strategically, the best choice may be to stay out, hope the Empire uses up too much resources thrumping them, hope the turning-the-other-way doesn't bite them in the butt too bad, and then wait for people to remember the Empire's atrocities more freshly than the Borg ones.

Hm.... or what if they try a Coup mid-war? Like, "Your leadership against the Borg is ineffective, we need to return to the ways of the Republic who beat the CIS"? Desperation could make them try that, and *if* it worked then the Borg threat may force Empire loyalists to accept it and not fight against it, but high backfire potential.

Really, I wouldn't want to be the rebels, it's a rock-and-a-hard-place situation.


Also another thought: Wouldn't a Borg war be a good opportunity for Vader to flex his Sith muscles? Image-wise, he's a famous-if-terrifying military commander of ruthless power, while Palpatine's public image has more softeness to it and a lot of people think he's being mislead by his advisors (I think, it's not *entirely* clear his full PR image), so he could take over to give people more 'confidence' against the threat. Of course, flipside, Sidious could throw Vader to the fires of anti-cyborg hysteria.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by The Romulan Republic »

Since the Borg are basically one hive mind (albeit not necessarily a strong mind, given the lack creative thinking), I sometimes wonder what would happen if a Jedi or Sith used the mind trick on a drone. Would it be utterly unaffected, or could you control the entire collective through the Force?
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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The minds are cybernetic so.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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So probably immune?

But their are organic components in their.

I suppose the obvious conclusion is that you could likely manipulate the mind of a specific drone to some extent (though the Collective might be able to override/disrupt that), but the effects wouldn't reach beyond that single drone.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Lord Revan wrote:the Dreadnaught was huge for an unmanned ship, I'd say based on it's relative size compared to Voyager it's at least as big as a Runabout if not bigger.
Oop! I missed your reply, Revan -- apologies.

The Cardie missile was indeed quite big. If memory serves, it would actually dwarf a Runabout. I'm thinking it was upwards of 100m long.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Lord Revan »

seanrobertson wrote:
Lord Revan wrote:the Dreadnaught was huge for an unmanned ship, I'd say based on it's relative size compared to Voyager it's at least as big as a Runabout if not bigger.
Oop! I missed your reply, Revan -- apologies.

The Cardie missile was indeed quite big. If memory serves, it would actually dwarf a Runabout. I'm thinking it was upwards of 100m long.
It looked like it was about as long as the engineering hull of the Voyager (though not as massive) but I went for a more conservative figure as it would make shooting down the Mars defense drones more impressive assuming they're roughly the same size ofc, since shooting down a smaller target is harder.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

The Romulan Republic wrote:Since the Borg are basically one hive mind (albeit not necessarily a strong mind, given the lack creative thinking), I sometimes wonder what would happen if a Jedi or Sith used the mind trick on a drone. Would it be utterly unaffected, or could you control the entire collective through the Force?
Note that creativity and strength of mind aren't necessarily the same. Vulcans are regularly uncreative but I wouldn't expect a mind trick to work on them in general. Seven of Nine came out pretty determined even when cut off.

We've seen some mind-to-mind stuff among the Borg and it comes across as pretty strong, voices haunting Picard and all that.


It might be that you can confuse a drone (it might depend on the drone- *not* all are the same after all, Seven being isolated was a lot different than Hugh, probably because Seven was an assimilated person and Hugh was probably grown a Borg. Try it on Locutus or the Queen and it won't work), but the cybernetics would give it conflicting inputs so it wouldn't necessarily follow the Trick like a normal weak willed person would.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Lord Revan wrote: It looked like it was about as long as the engineering hull of the Voyager (though not as massive) but I went for a more conservative figure as it would make shooting down the Mars defense drones more impressive assuming they're roughly the same size ofc, since shooting down a smaller target is harder.
Possibly. I'll note the rate of fire as well- regardless of how big they were, the weapon that took them out was pretty rapid-fire, unlike the bigger beams used on full ships- and they do use the same weapon a few times in the First Contact battle, four times against ships that were either smaller or looked like they had shields down- every single one was an on-target killshot (well, and one was shot offscreen but since it wasn't near a target it can be assumed to be aimed at a more distant ship), but they never used it against a larger ship, they use the larger beams on those and those are the ones that sometimes miss or have to be swept onto their target.

Similarly, it may be a Federation example rather than Borg, but Conundrum scene. Those attack craft look *maybe* Runabout size if not smaller (and kinda resemble Y-wings!) and the E-D was able to just bolt out attacks rapid fire. Sure, they weren't maneuvering too rapidly, but it seems to look like Trek weapons, when you're on low power to hit weaker targets you can crank up ROF and with good accuracy.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Lord Revan »

Problem with Conudrum that it involved engaging a signifigantly inferior opponent you can't just ignore that as it was a major plotpoint of the episode. I'm not saying a GCS can't hit a shuttle sized opponent, question is how well can they do that when the opponent isn't essentially daring them to shoot aka maneuvering slow and in a predictble manner, raw speed matters only when the relative speed difference is really high and both the Lysian attack craft and mars defense drones moved in a very predictble manner.

There are essentially 3 things that make a target hard to hit, size (since it's obviously easier to hit a bigger target), relative speed and what ever maneuvering both the target and the ship shooting are doing (since in space all movement is relative and unpredictble movement makes it harder to hit your target).
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Lord Revan wrote:Problem with Conudrum that it involved engaging a signifigantly inferior opponent you can't just ignore that as it was a major plotpoint of the episode. I'm not saying a GCS can't hit a shuttle sized opponent, question is how well can they do that when the opponent isn't essentially daring them to shoot aka maneuvering slow and in a predictble manner, raw speed matters only when the relative speed difference is really high and both the Lysian attack craft and mars defense drones moved in a very predictble manner.

There are essentially 3 things that make a target hard to hit, size (since it's obviously easier to hit a bigger target), relative speed and what ever maneuvering both the target and the ship shooting are doing (since in space all movement is relative and unpredictble movement makes it harder to hit your target).
Sure (and the FC examples had the targets moving more, but larger than the Lysian craft and at generally close range), but I emphasize the rate of fire against low-protection targets. Let's say that high maneuvering reduces accuracy by half- you'd still be losing fighters at a fast rate.


I'd also raise torpedo-esque weapons can be used for proximity blast kills.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Hey. Guys.



Cubes are impressive ships but I'm not sure they can dispatch fighters with the same ease as the Enterprise did the Lysian craft.

That ship isn't to spec, of course, but it's not exactly amazing in terms of firepower either.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Oh hey, of note, 'masked their approach with a dispersal field'! That answers our question about Borg stealth doesn't it? I love when sourcing one thing answers another question.

And yea, not the best showing, though the Delta Flyer is a trickier target than those Lysian ships, rather tough for it's size (it was designed for gas giant diving, and on it's third mission it managed to crash hard enough to entomb itself deep in solid rock), and they scored multiple hits even if some misses too.

Hm, showed two shots (missed) from two smaller beam weapons I've never seen before (only used in point-blank defense maybe? They're much more close together than the large beam weapon's projectors have ever been shown to be), we saw the projectile-shooter fire a two shot burst... pretty sad showing even for a damaged cube, even if they were aiming for a capture. Good data, and suggests they aren't going to do as good against fighters as I assumed, though they do have more anti-fighter weapons than they show in the bigger battles too.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Q99 wrote:
Lord Insanity wrote: Wait the new canon changed that? Why didn't you just point that out in the first place then? That changes everything. The entirety of my main point is that the Borg would be hard pressed to make up the commanding industrial lead the Empire has over them. If the Empire doesn't have that massive lead then your assumptions on the overall scenario are right and mine are wrong.
Your main point has been forcing an analogy about Roman forges even when it's pointed out the multiple ways the analogy doesn't work, and you have repeatedly reiterated that because the Borg use 'Roman forges' they can't make SW tech even if they try and learn it with assimilation.

If your point on 'Roman Forges' and being unable to learn the tech was right, the difference in industry between making the DS2 fast or slow would not be a critical factor as they have a much larger base force to begin with, and still quite a considerable industry (the Deathstars were being constructed simultaneously in the new stuff, after all, in addition to normal ship production).
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The original Death Star 2 construction numbers are that it was about 60% complete in about 6 months in secret. That is roughly the equivalent of building 32.5 Borg cubes per minute. A Death Star is built around a planet destroying weapon (in addition to thousands of conventional weapons), has power generation for that purpose, and a hyperdrive. It is a giant ship with all of the exotic and/or rare material needs a ship has scaled up to its size, so the comparison is completely valid.

In absolute terms Borg industrial processes are very fast (as you keep insisting) but compared to those numbers for the Empire they are pathetically slow. It is the equivalent of a Roman forge versus a modern blast furnace. If those numbers are no longer canon, then the relative differences are no where near that large and the whole point is moot.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Is the thing about the construction of the Death Star almost bankrupting the Empire still canon?
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

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Unsure. What is canon, and has been declared ex-cathedra by Pablo - now that he can do that - and put in reference books again, is the much smaller size of the DS2, not reflective of the numbers on SDN's main site.

The 160 and 900 km sizes are being considered an effects glich - for instance a 120 km death star is present in Rogue One, and WEG numbers are canon again.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by Q99 »

Lord Insanity wrote: The original Death Star 2 construction numbers are that it was about 60% complete in about 6 months in secret. That is roughly the equivalent of building 32.5 Borg cubes per minute. A Death Star is built around a planet destroying weapon (in addition to thousands of conventional weapons), has power generation for that purpose, and a hyperdrive. It is a giant ship with all of the exotic and/or rare material needs a ship has scaled up to its size, so the comparison is completely valid.

In absolute terms Borg industrial processes are very fast (as you keep insisting) but compared to those numbers for the Empire they are pathetically slow. It is the equivalent of a Roman forge versus a modern blast furnace. If those numbers are no longer canon, then the relative differences are no where near that large and the whole point is moot.
Except you weren't talking about raw total production capacity at all, you were very explicitly talking about their ability to learn and make SW tech to begin with, and this was highly obvious in my posts, your insistence on it taking 'decades' to catch up tech wise (and the Borg couldn't catch up in total production in decades without gaining vast amounts of new territory, and also mentioning technical knowledge from experts, so you were very clearly talking about tech level not raw production output). Are you trying to tell me you accidentally framed all your posts as about being the tech level and time it takes to learn the technology when you really meant total industrial output the whole time?

Did you not read my arguments and posts at all? About how once the Borg gain SW tech their key is to steal production capacity by Assimilation so they don't have to get into a straight production contest? New numbers or old, "The Borg use their existing facilities to try and out-produce the Empire" is a losing strategy, while "trying to take Empire worlds and ships so it's production becomes theirs" is the one I and everyone else have been debating for some time.

Or are you just trying to change what you were arguing about?

Whatever the case, you're a seriously bad debater.
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Re: General Empire vs Borg musings

Post by seanrobertson »

NecronLord wrote:Unsure. What is canon, and has been declared ex-cathedra by Pablo - now that he can do that - and put in reference books again, is the much smaller size of the DS2, not reflective of the numbers on SDN's main site.

The 160 and 900 km sizes are being considered an effects glich - for instance a 120 km death star is present in Rogue One, and WEG numbers are canon again.
Where did you find that info, honorable Necron? Hidalgo's Twitter says he'd "bank on" a 160 km DS1, and I think that's what SW dot com says. Further, the latter source still pegs the Executor at 19 km, so I'm not seeing a rollback to WEG numbers. Maybe you're talking about armament figures?
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