TheDarkling wrote:The cubes regular shields should have protected them from transport however the crew beams over when they first try to rescue Picard - Geordi or the Chief say they have raised an em field that is blocking the transporter.
I suppose the point could be made that they didnt mean shields to be shut down but afterwards Data simply fires thrusters and they escape (of course he may have raised the shields without saying it)
The borgs shields seem to be hull hugging (seen when the E-D uses the deflector weapon) yet this em field was far and away from the Borgs hull, another indication that there were two shields/fields.
Another incident I remember is in the DS9 episode A time to Stand - the crew gets trapped inside the shield of a Supply base (they are in a stolen Jem Hadar ship) and they cant escape until the generator is destroyed.
Good points. Basically, the problem is that the episodes with the Borg are open to interpretation, especially due to the fact that previously canon rules of how things work are routinely thrown overboard if they interfere with the way a writer wants a plot to go. Your interpretation of the scenes with the Borg cube also fit the observed events. It just seems to me that the methods used by the Borg are needlessly complex, even for villains in the ST universe.
When Locutus came along it is quite possible that he was subconsciously giving the Enterprise crew a way in by following typical Starfleet methods and deploying a shield bubble. The shuttlecraft trick would likely not have worked against a hull hugging shield system. With the defensive shields directly on top of the structural integrity field and the hull, the shuttlecraft would have had to physically touch the cube, hull to hull. Any movement on the part of the cube would have likely destroyed the shuttlecraft. The trick of beaming over to the cube just before the shuttlecraft was destroyed would hardly have worked if the shuttlecraft first had to chug along to latch onto the cube's hull.
A more reasonable action on the part of the Enterprise crew in that particular situation would have immediately destroyed the cube. Locutus would have also been destroyed, but better dead than Borg according to Picard. (It also seems incredible that not one of those bereaved by the actions of Locutus, and there must have been tens of thousands who lost friends and family members, attempted to take action against the man who, willingly or not, became a collaborator and traitor. It would have been excellent fodder for an episode or three.)
Basically, several shuttlecraft would have penetrated the blocking field or shield and immediately beamed over one or two torpedoes each. Immediately after being beamed over, the torpedoes would have been set off and gutted the cube before effective countermeasures could be implemented.
On the Jem'Hadar incident: My only immediate solution to that dilemma would be to note that the fields employed by navigational deflectors do not appear to be affected by field slipping. As a stationary base vulnerable to intentional and accidental collisions, the base might well have been equipped with a fairly powerful omnidirectional navigational deflector system. Since the base did not need to generate warp fields or impulse drive fields, the base would have had power to spare if it was equipped with something like the power systems of a battle-damaged Jem'Hadar cruiser. That is, of course, a large pile of conjecture on my part.
