Borg scout ship in "I, Borg"

[seanrobertson]

Hiya. This is something that's bugged me for quite awhile...

In "I, Borg" we see the wreckage of a Borg scout "cube." Later, when another ship comes to pick Hugh up, Data reports that it's the same type as that which crashed. He also notes that it masses two point five million metric tons. ?!?! WTF?!

Perhaps we didn't see all of the first ship's actual wreckage, but we know it only carried 5 drones. Even if it could carry more--a LOT more--that mass seems wildly inconsistent with what we know of Borg cubes; i.e., vast empty spaces ("Scorpion," "Q Who?"), huge empty cargo bay rooms ("Collective"), and their funny idea of an outer hull (literally excess MODEL SPRUE until "First Contact" came along).

What the hell gives, here? How could something that's undoubtedly pretty small even BEGIN to have such mass?

All thoughts welcome.

[SirNitram]

IIRC, we did a comparison of the stated mass and the size of a fully-funcitonal cube. It's total density came out around that of Helium.

[Darth Wong]

Either the mass figure is overstated, the ship is not actually of the same type, or we didn't see the whole wreckage. The fact is that if the ship in question had that much mass, it would have been extremely dense and pounded a huge hole into the ground when it crashed.

The fact is that it crashed hard enough to completely shatter its physical structure, yet it did not impact deeply into the ground. This simple observation proves two things:

1) Borg ships are structurally weak.

2) Wildly overstated density estimates from this scene are impossible.

Not that this will stop rabid Trekkies from repeating them, but quite frankly, if you have an object whose bulk density really is orders of magnitude greater than any natural material, it will make a fantastic kinetic penetrator, and we did NOT see this at the crash site.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn]

Data stated it, and we all know how accurate he is with numbers.