Borg vs. Empire

[Eleas]

"But then agian I made an extreme example and he still brushed it off as eh they would do it somehow brush-off"

True. But based on the shown capabilities of the Culture vessels, I'd almost without qualification state that if it's possible to do it, a Mind would find a way.

"Remeber this thing has lost some of its mind its just learning how to deal with Borg Tecnology and Facing somthing it has not faced before, somthing thats roughly two-five times it size(Depends on the Force the Empire Brings to Bear) ship to ship out-guns it by a Considable Margin and is lead by Beanings its never met"

True. Still, there is a part in one of the books that describes a Mind quite well.

The Avatar smiled silkily and leaned closer to Ziller. "Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt at producing an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."
(Paraphrased from Look to Windward)

And it wasn't really bragging.

[Mr Bean]

Am I getting the impression this is one of those no-win senaros with to many unknows?

And as I've said before there are some senariors that are simply impossible no matter how intellgant you are

IE
Your tied to a post there are ten men facing you with Machine guns, in five seconds they will shoot you
Tell me now oh Culture mind how you get out of that one?


Not like they are runing around with infinite improablity Drive

[Singular Quartet]

Am I getting the impression this is one of those no-win senaros with to many unknows?

You're getting the idea, here.

Your tied to a post there are ten men facing you with Machine guns, in five seconds they will shoot you
Tell me now oh Culture mind how you get out of that one?

Easy, you have a drone in your pocket. Some of them are barely larger than you hand, and preactically all of them have feild strengths powerful enough to stop bullets.

Not like they are runing around with infinite improablity Drive

True. But they may as well be.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Mind my asking exactly what the hell is this "Culture" thing you guys keep mentioning? I've seen it talked about on here and SB, but I have no freaking idea what it is.

[GSV Use Psychology]

Mind my asking exactly what the hell is this "Culture" thing you guys keep mentioning? I've seen it talked about on here and SB, but I have no freaking idea what it is.

It's a space-faring civilization from a series of books written by Iain M Banks. There's an essay on the Culture at http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html which is written by Banks himself.

You might also want to do a search on the Culture at SB, considering that probably dozens of people have asked the same question as you

[Cpt_Frank]

So as far as the scenario is concerned, I'd say:
If the Borg already incorporated Culture tech in large scale, then the Empire will lose. If this is not the case, and the Imps are attacking with full strength, then they will win.
Both sides actually could win. But it would take the borg a long time to incorporate all the culture tech into their ships. They'd probably have to build completely new vessels (how do you upgrade a Ford T to a M1A1 ?).
That'll take time, which the Empire can use.

[Singular Quartet]

The ten wormholes pen at random, you say? This may or may not give the Enhanced Borg enough time. If one opens into their space, they might be able to close it, given the amount of treknobabble also at the borg's disposal, but it is doubtful. If it opens elsewhere, then the borg may have time to build Culture warships to take on any invading forces. Let some outter worlds die, while building up a fleet in the inner worlds.

[Howedar]

If it opens elsewhere, then the borg may have time to build Culture warships to take on any invading forces. .

Any and all knowledge of the Culture is inaccessable to the Mind.

[GSV Use Psychology]

Any and all knowledge of the Culture is inaccessable to the Mind.

Yes, but wouldn't this still allow it to figure out stuff on it's own? Just by looking at it's own innards the Mind should have access to atleast hyperspace, field, warp and whatever power generation technology it uses. Considering that a drone is capable of creating it's own nanorepair units I'd say that a Mind can atleast come up with the science behind alot of advanced technology quite rapidly.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Unless they also get Culture tech the Borg DIE

[THEHOOLIGANJEDI]

The way Luke gets killed:
The Imperial Guard, whose fighting skills are almost as good as the Jedi's,
comes into the Throne room after Palp went down the shaft crying, there are 6 of them. They activate their pikes and cut Luke into ribbons.

where the hell did you hear that from? I'm sorry but that is sooo laughable.

[2000AD]

Crimson Empire:
(quote goes something like this)
"I only know two types of people with those skills, Jedi Knights and the Emperor's Royal Guard."

Given that it's the Emperor I assume that the guards in his chamber on the death star will be their most elite.

[Darth Yoshi]

Plus, in Crimson Empire, Kir Kanos defeated Carnor Jax, despite the fact that Jax was a Force adept and and former Guardsman.

[2000AD]

Good point. But don't forget that Jax was ignoring Kanos because he thought the Rebel's were his friends and they had said they wanted to take him (Jax) alive, therefor Jax thought Kanos wouldn't kill him.

[Eleas]

"Plus, in Crimson Empire, Kir Kanos defeated Carnor Jax, despite the fact that Jax was a Force adept and and former Guardsman."

Yeah, but there's no direct evidence for Jax being able to use anything like Jedi combat sense. The only ones we know for sure with that ability were able to easily kill Royal Guardsmen - even Brakiss managed, and he wasn't particularly combat-oriented if we go by the new D20 RPG.

[Shrike]

Now, watch as using only a Culture Mind and the Borg Collective, I destroy the Galactic Empire!

At heart, assimilation is the quest for information, something the Culture is good at storing. Biological organisms are such inefficient methods of storing information, aren't they? And drones don't have much distinctiveness as it is. Any important information is vaccumed out and dumped into the vast resevoir that is the Mind's memory. The time this takes is dependent upon the Collective's bandwidth, but I doubt it would take all that long. Now, the Mind is the Collective, and the Collective is nothing but an extension of the Mind. None of this hive-mind shit.

With this control comes knowledge. The Mind now has the understanding of all Borg technology and how to apply it. Seeing obvious inefficiencies, it redesigns the various Borg vessels and begins to apply the fix.

The first sign would be the melting of all drones into organic goo and their conversion to nanobots; really, drones are rather inefficient and would do better to become more nanobots. All that open space inside a Cube is rather useless now, isn't it? All those corridors and alcoves....who needs them? Not the Collective. Flush with thousands of drones worth of extra nanomachines, the cubes begin to reconfigure themselves to a more efficient state. For the sake of argument, they stay cubical, but are now much smaller and are pretty much solid all the way through. Further improvements can be undertaken at the same time, such as an increase in Collective bandwidth to deal with the new, high-speed Collective. You can never have too much bandwidth, and there is a significant speed difference between nanomachine operating speed and organic operating speed.

This conversion would be fairly rapid as well, as evident by the inordinant speed of Borg repairs. I'd say a few days, tops, and that's conversative. Building them might take longer, but it's still going to be fast.

It would probably be around now that the Collective would see the opening of multiple wormholes in the Delta Quadrant. These would have a high priority for investigation (as per the thread rules) but that does not mean the Collective will rush into it. A Mind is patient among other traits, and would first set up cubes around the wormholes to guard and study them. If the Collective does not have access to a cloaking device, one can be developed by working from first principles or if something is needed faster, a Romulan vessel can be assimilated. Lets say the Collective desires a cloaking device immediately, perhaps also wants to test out the upgraded ships, and vectors Cube #90210 to a known Romulan outpost. The new cube is going to be smaller and tougher than the standard assmiliation cube, and will feature hull armor. It probably wouldn't send a message, sending transmissions takes time and power, why bother? Well, depends if the Mind is feeling playful. If it was, the message it send might go like this:

WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND POWER DOWN YOUR WEAPONS. WE WILL ADD YOUR INTELLECTUAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. WE WILL UTILISE YOUR MATERIEL COMPONENTS TO FURTHER THE COLLECTIVE. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

The ploy would be to make a beeline for Romulus. This would undoubtedly cause a large number of Romulan ships to appear out of cloak and engage, the objective of this exercise is to capture a cloaking device. While the Collective is scaring the shit out of the Rommies with the new message, Cube #90210 would latch on to every ship within range with its tractor beams and begin draining shields. As soon as the shields are drained, the transporters start up. With the drones all converted to nanobots, something else is needed for boarding actions. What better toys to use than those self-same nanobots? A kilo here, a kilo there, a kilo in the main computer... the Romulan ships would be assimilated with unpleasant speed, as the nanobots begin converting all nonessential equipment into more nanobots, and taking over all essential equipment. If even greater speed is desired, priority targets can include the transporter systems of the Warbirds. Site-to-Site nanobot transport using the Warbirds own internal systems. With the ship's systems firmly under the Cube's control, the crew rapidly succumbs to nanobot assimilation, coming through the deck or from the ceiling. Kind of like the Beast from HW:C.
The crew would be kept as drones until their mind-states have been downloaded into the Collective as a whole, this ensures that no valuable information is accidentally lost.

Now that a number of ships have been captured, including ones with cloaking devices, the mission is accomplished. There is currently little to be gained in assimilating the Romulans, it is better to depart and let them try to develop some new toys to be assimilated. Once cloaking devices are fitted to all of the Collective's ships, further operations against any other powers that could have useful technology. (federation, dominion, krenim, etc) Special emphasis is made to gain unusual or potentially useful technologies such as subspace transporters, isokinetic cannons, phasing cloaks, genesis technology and the like. Technology such as SIF and mass lightening would be applied to the Collective's ships as well.

The Collective can now proceed to investigate the wormholes under the cover of cloaking devices. We'll assume that by now the Empire has launched various probes through the wormholes, 3 of which are in or near Borg territory. (given that they are scattered throughout the galaxy) Assuming that they are probots or the like, they will be easily assimilated by the Collective. Now, the Collective can begin sending false information to the Imperials through the co-opted probe comm systems. Minds being the sneaky AIs they are, it would probably give fake information, giving the impression that Borg space is empty and useless. This would work especially well if the probes were programmed to look for certain planet types. This would allow ideal criteria to be fed back to the Imperials, with likely results being that a manned task force be sent out. With doctored date showing the area to be empty, a heavy escort would be unlikely, and the Imperial ships would be lured into a trap... a system filled with cloaked cubes.

Operating in a supposedly empty zone without active ray shields or jamming equipment, the Imperials would have no defenses against cubes uncloaking and suddenly depositing nanomachines all through the Imperial ships. Those systems would come online rapidly of course as the Imperials prepared for combat, but it's unlikely that they would come on fast enough to stop at least one wave of nanobot assimilators. Priority targets for assimilation would be communications and control equipment, with jamming from the Cubes used to prevent a message escaping. The decloaked Cubes would then advance to engage the warships, the loss of a dozen frankly expendable cubes being acceptable in light of the returns of gaining information on the tactical ability of their opponents. The superior firepower of the Imperial ships should destroy the cubes fairly quickly, but the remaining cloaked cubes would be recording all data from the engagement. Furthermore, the assimilation nanobots onboard the Imperial ships will be rapidly but covertly expanding their hold on the vessel. Soon enough, the task force is assimilated.

Anyhow, it's rather late, I'll continue this later. I'm sure you can see where it's going though.

On an unrelated note, I found this while looking for an unaltered transcript of a Borg assimilation message. Short and funny.
http://jemimap.freeshell.org/voy/fic/sh ... fborg.html