Vorlons/Shadows vs Borg

[Enigma]

If they can be integrated wouldn't the Borg then be able to assimilate it? A new and improved Borg Slicer Beam?

It's possible, there's the difficulty of capturing one for assimilation though, i mean, how are they supposed to do that? Crippling one in space i don't know if it would leave anything of use behind since it all just seems to bleed out and shrivel up, and we know the shadows didn't want their shit stolen so went to the extreme measures of blowing up their home planet. It's not like you can surround a ship that can phase to hyperspace at will. I suppose they could throw drones at one in the hope that one will land on it and inject nanobots in, but still, there was that thing about people being killed (presumably by the energy sink that shadow stuff seems to have) so the drones could very well die if they touch it.

As for integrating shadow slizer beams, I'd imagine that would be hella scary, but I don't know if their power generation/handling capabilities would be that well suited to it, given what we've seen from a cube's normal weapons.

Well the Borg do have their own slicer beams, I'd think they'd be able to incorporate it into their own ships.

[Eleas]

Well the Borg do have their own slicer beams, I'd think they'd be able to incorporate it into their own ships.

Huh? That doesn't mean a thing. For all we know, the Borg and Shadow weapons might use completely incompatible technologies.

[brianeyci]

Yes it is. Wether or not the VPK is their main combat vessel is irrelevant. They were able to build it, thus they have the material science to do so.

Holy shit, I just checked on the VPK and its fucking 45 kilometers long assuming that +http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison_huge.gif is correct. Point for the Vorlons.

FTL accelleration is a non-Newtonian phenomenon and thus need not apply any stress on the ship. Feel free to show how non-Newtonian effects are in any way dependent on the size/mass of the ship, or how they indicate physical durability.

Fine, that was a moronic comment. Will you accept that Borg sub-light acceleration requires that the Borg have more advanced materials science than the Feds? As well, this may be a point for the Borg as well. The Borg's main combat vessel is much larger than the Vorlon's main combat vessel, but why? Why not have a larger vessel? Since FTL doesn't put stress on the hull, the Vorlon Planet Killer could be akin to a huge building that jumps in and out of hyperspace. We certainly see VPK always escorted by smaller vessels, and IIRC we never see VPK in combat with normal vessels. The only reasons why I can think the Vorlons would want to make a vessel smaller is either for maneuverability, or perhaps limited resources. At the least, they should have several "battleship" class vessels other than their standard heavy cruiser, which we don't see. The VPK being a huge building that jumps in and out of hyperspace and maneuvers very little works, since IIRC we see VPK move at a snails pace compared to the heavy cruisers. On the opposite side, we have the Borg, whose primary combat vessel is much larger than the Vorlon heavy cruiser, and who have been seen to maneuver quickly in impulse (REF:VOY where the Borg cubes fly by Voyager).

Sorry that was a lot of spam. To sum, we haven't seen the VPK move like a Vorlon heavy cruiser IIRC. It could just be a huge building floating in space going in and out of hyperspace.

Either FTL DOES put a serious strain on the ship's spaceframe, in which case Borg hulls, not being ridiculously more resilient than Fed ones, need AMRE/SIF to stay intact, or it DOESN'T, in which case there's no reason to assume Borg ships are ridiculously more resilient in the first place.

False dilemma fallacy. It is not "The Borg rely on SIF as much as the Federation" or not, the Borg can use SIF without relying on it. We know that warp causes stresses on the ship (least to a shuttle) that can cause microfractures, so FTL does put strain on ship's hulls. The question is whether the Borg use SIF to the degree that the Feds do. The Federation relies on SIF to keep bulkheads together on a stationary space station for goodness sake. The Borg are stupid, but before assigning the Borg the level of stupidity that they rely on SIF to keep together a wall, burden of proof.

That's assuming the fleet will be functional long enough for any of them to fire more than 10 torpedoes. As, at least to my knowledge, no other ship than a Galaxy has ever fired a 10-torpedo spread, and that fleet was a rag-tag ensemble of whatever they could get to Wolf 359 in time , 10 torpedoes per ship before they're killed is NOT conservative. It is by no means generous, but it IS reasonable.

Fine, we agree on the figure being reasonable.

You ARE aware that this says nothing about Starfleet's alleged torpedo ships, of course.

Sure. If Starfleet has torpedo boats, they logically would have more torpedoes than a scout class vessel, or a Galaxy. If we see them have more torpedo launchers.

We have. DS9 runabouts if nothing else.

Ok.

No it's not. Wether for good or ill, Trek TMs have no canonicity whatsoever. They're quite simply worthless in a debate. I agree some of them are sorta useful (I personally rather like the E-D deck plans) but the fact remains that unless they're backed up by the TV series they might as well not exist.

We've seen Akiras on screen. Fine, point to you, but I remember in a previous thread when we were talking about phasers, either you or someone else brought up the TM and said that phaser rifles were just hand phasers with a stock and extra ammunition. If you didn't bring up this point, I certainly don't remember you disagreeing with it.

So? Everybody knows Voyager fired more torpedoes than she could possibly have carried. She also lost approximately three times the shuttles she had. They were obviously manufacturing replacements underway. Your point being?

A scout class vessel with 150 crew that has torpedo launchers means logically that ships with more crew have torpedo launchers and a higher payload.

Not that the total amount of torpedoes carried has anything to do with the number you're capable of firing before your ship is destroyed...

Sure, a Borg ship can take down a Fed ship's shields in seconds. We've also seen certain Fed ships last long enough to fire their torpedoes. Defiant, Akiras, Steamrunners and Sovereign come to mind. Mirandas and I believe Nebulas are pieces of shit. Fed torpedo launchers launch around one torpedo per second, and looking at how long the Akiras and Streamrunners last in ST:FC, they have more than enough time to lob a huge payload at the Borg ship.

Are you seriously suggesting that a Borg ship can tear through entire Federation fleets in seconds, before they have a chance to fire? Borg ships don't have that kind of firepower buddy. We know what standard Federation battle tactics are -- they line up in a wall and approach the enemy. So a Fed fleet approaching a Borg cube would likely have the majority of ships be able to launch an alpha strike before the Borg ship can destroy them all. Even assuming that a Borg ship can disable one ship every five seconds (ridiculous since Akiras, Steamrunners and Defiant last pretty long against the cube in ST:FC), since each ship can fire a torpedo a second, that's a shitload of torpedoes.

As no Sovereign was around for Wolf 359 that is relevant because of?

Irrelevant for Wolf 359. Sorry I didn't make that clearer, I'm not just talking about Wolf 359, I'm also been cross-referring to ST:FC battle. IIRC that battle lasted 10+ hours. I don't know how much more conservative you can get with estimates. Take your 5 megaton figure, assume that one one ship was firing at a time at the Borg cube (meaning the battle was continuous) and you still get a low gigaton shield estimate. Do we agree on the low gigaton shield estimate?

That TNG Trek can eat most if not all of the B5 powers isn't exactly a recent discvery, you know.

Wasn't for me either, I was being sarcastic.

Brian

[brianeyci]

It's possible, there's the difficulty of capturing one for assimilation though, i mean, how are they supposed to do that?

TNG Borg's first tactic was to lower the enemy's shields and use transporters. Have we seen the inside of a Shadow ship? Does it have an interior like a Vorlon ship? If not, then there's room in Vorlon ships for a drone to transport on at least.

If the Borg first encounter the Vorlons, they will attempt to lower the enemy ship's shields and beam a guy on board and assimilate their knowledge database.

Brian

[White Haven]

In all fairness, B5 had some DAMN lazy modellers, many times we heard of 'Narn dreadnoughts' and other things of that nature, but we only ever see a single Narn ship model, etcetera.

[StarshipTitanic]

In all fairness, B5 had some DAMN lazy modellers, many times we heard of 'Narn dreadnoughts' and other things of that nature, but we only ever see a single Narn ship model, etcetera.

Wrong, we saw a few other designs but they were smaller and weaker than the G'Quan cruiser. The Narn didn't bother deploying those ships against the Centauri because even the G'Quan had trouble with the smallest Centauri ships.

[fgalkin]

In all fairness, B5 had some DAMN lazy modellers, many times we heard of 'Narn dreadnoughts' and other things of that nature, but we only ever see a single Narn ship model, etcetera.

What about this?



Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[StarshipTitanic]

To be fair, I do recall them only being shown in the first episode of the first season, so I can see why he missed them.

They're also stupid-looking designs.

[Robert Walper]

Yes, but Shadow vessels are not at all volumnous compared to Cubes. I'd hazard to guess that a Cube is a thousand times more volumnous than a crab o' doom.

Borg cubes have a volume of 28 cubic kilometers. Over three kilometers per side.

[Robert Walper]

One thing that gets me is the assertion "lately the Borg have a bad track record assimilating biotech". Based on what? Species 8472? For fuck's sake, the Borg have encountered and classified over ten thousand species, with one from another dimension being resistant to typical assimilation attempts. I hardly call that a "bad" track record.

[Darth Wong]

One thing that gets me is the assertion "lately the Borg have a bad track record assimilating biotech". Based on what? Species 8472? For fuck's sake, the Borg have encountered and classified over ten thousand species, with one from another dimension being resistant to typical assimilation attempts. I hardly call that a "bad" track record.

Not one of those species had sufficient biotech to actually perform the outlandish feat of making functional and combat-effective organic ships ... except for Species 8472. It's not as silly as you make it out to be.

[Robert Walper]

Not one of those species had sufficient biotech to actually perform the outlandish feat of making functional and combat-effective organic ships ... except for Species 8472. It's not as silly as you make it out to be.

Point taken. However, I think evidence on a advanced immune system for their ships and personnel that can deal with nanoprobes is required to really assert they have the same type of immunity.

[Rye]

TNG Borg's first tactic was to lower the enemy's shields and use transporters. Have we seen the inside of a Shadow ship? Does it have an interior like a Vorlon ship? If not, then there's room in Vorlon ships for a drone to transport on at least.

Shadow ships are apparently full of jelly, you submerge a "properly treated" telepath inside They can apparently accommodate new material like star furies if they want to though, but it's likewise submerged in jelly.

As for "lowering" the shadows' shields, I don't think that's a viable tactic since their "shields" aren't a field projected outside the ship so much as any ST species i could name, they're more like a heatsink that disperses the energy of an attack over the ship's surface, and presumably down the legs to space or hyperspace.

If the Borg first encounter the Vorlons, they will attempt to lower the enemy ship's shields and beam a guy on board and assimilate their knowledge database.

Ok, so they lower the shields and beam aboard, there's no guarantee there's anything they can assimilate or any common type of computer terminals. In addition, their ships are self aware, aware of intruders and have been shown to grow anti personnel weaponry from the walls.

Worst comes to worst, if the vorlons have encounter suits onboard, they could use the weaponry hidden in them, or burn through the borg like Ulkesh (kosh 2) did with the B5 hull in his natural state.

Here's some babtech examples of shadow slizer beam attacks:

Attack on Narn base
Shadows attack a different Narn base
Shadow warship cuts narn cruiser in half
Shadow ship attacks vorlon craft - I should note that a vorlon ship's shields actually held against the slizer attack and required 2 full on shots of it before it was "wounded" and even then didn't seem to mind that much.

[Jeremy]

In the Technomage Trilogy a Battle Crab was either able to make or already had compartments for passangers and a shuttle. There is also an area that has a tank that the CPU is submerged into that Galen was able to access on the surface of Z'ha'dum.

Novels are semi-canon as long as they do not contradict the filmed story if I recall correctly.

[brianeyci]

Ok, so they lower the shields and beam aboard, there's no guarantee there's anything they can assimilate or any common type of computer terminals. In addition, their ships are self aware, aware of intruders and have been shown to grow anti personnel weaponry from the walls.

Worst comes to worst, if the vorlons have encounter suits onboard, they could use the weaponry hidden in them, or burn through the borg like Ulkesh (kosh 2) did with the B5 hull in his natural state.

Well, if worst comes to worst for the Borg, if they can't assimilate they'll just sit behind their shielded cubes and fire (everybody in this thread so far agrees to at leat a single-digit gigaton estimate for Borg shielding). According to Brian Young's site, the upper limit for Shadow defensive capability is 60 megatons delivered over a few seconds, and twelve megatons sends a shadow ship shrivelled up and spinning out of control.

Here's some babtech examples of shadow slizer beam attacks:

Shadow slicer beams are pretty cool, and I remember those instances. That doesn't mean that they'll automatically be able to do the same to Borg ships. Looking at the numbers on Young's site, if the Vorlons don't figure a way to lower the Borg's shields, they don't have a chance.

Brian

[Darth Wong]

Given that the Vorlon planet-killer probably has 1E7 to 1E8 megaton firepower, one could probably interpolate between that and estimates for smaller Vorlon ships to get a function which you could use to estimate the firepower of the bigger Vorlon battlecruisers.

[brianeyci]

Given that the Vorlon planet-killer probably has 1E7 to 1E8 megaton firepower, one could probably interpolate between that and estimates for smaller Vorlon ships to get a function which you could use to estimate the firepower of the bigger Vorlon battlecruisers.

Even with that, you have the Borg with thousands of star systems and tens of thousands of vessels. I don't see how the Vorlons could win unless their weapons were orders of magnitude more powerful than Borg, and even if their larger battleships possess such firepower the upper limit Brian Young puts is 60 megatons on a Shadow Crab and 12 megatons seriously cripples one, so Vorlon Battlecruisers can't be an order of magnitude more resilient than that. I want the Vorlons to win too, but just comparing the hard numbers on your site and Young's site, they lose.

Brian

[Darth Wong]

Given that the Vorlon planet-killer probably has 1E7 to 1E8 megaton firepower, one could probably interpolate between that and estimates for smaller Vorlon ships to get a function which you could use to estimate the firepower of the bigger Vorlon battlecruisers.

Even with that, you have the Borg with thousands of star systems and tens of thousands of vessels. I don't see how the Vorlons could win unless their weapons were orders of magnitude more powerful than Borg, and even if their larger battleships possess such firepower the upper limit Brian Young puts is 60 megatons on a Shadow Crab and 12 megatons seriously cripples one, so Vorlon Battlecruisers can't be an order of magnitude more resilient than that. I want the Vorlons to win too, but just comparing the hard numbers on your site and Young's site, they lose.

Brian

You are treating my very generous use of the TM's figures for photon torpedo firepower as a hard figure now, even though Pegasus actually indicates far, far lower yields.

[brianeyci]

You are treating my very generous use of the TM's figures for photon torpedo firepower as a hard figure now, even though Pegasus actually indicates far, far lower yields.

Batman corrected me about this already. Fine, if we take 5 megaton yield of a photon torpedo (I assume this is the yield predicted by Pegasus since Batman mentioned it, if not then I apologize), that's twelve hits to destroy a Shadow vessel and three to cripple it. Even if we go to the hundreds of kilotons range, that just puts Borg cubes on par with Shadow heavy cruisers. And if the Vorlons do have more firepower, it won't be by an order of magnitude, and the Borg have orders of magnitude more vessels and industrial capacity... I really don't see how the Vorlons can win.

Brian

[18-Till-I-Die]

At the Final Battle from 'Into the Fire' i'm prety sure it was implied the Vorlons and Shadows had fleets of tens of thousands of ships, plus other fleets still out there, and we have seen they each have several planet killers each. So there seems to be some indication they have a slight numerical advantage over the Borg.

Plus, i bring up those Shadow missiles again--they were strong enough to plow through thousands of miles of planetary material in a few seconds or minuets and had multi-gigaton warheads, plus they were strong enough structurally to survive with the immense pressures of a planet's insides all around them so i doubt shooting them down would even work. Maybe with a kamikaze strike, like in Into the Fire. But they'd go straight through the Borg ships in short order. And the Death Storms can envelop huge areas of space, and entire planets. I just dont think the Borg have anything that can compete with the Shadow Clouds.

Even if their Crabs are not effective, those Clouds would just envelop and destroy whole Borg planets and fleets. And if their ability to stall FTL systems are in effect, it becomes even worse. Really it all comes down to those Death Clouds and how many the Shadows can feild in a short time. With a sufficiently large fleet to defend them, they could very well defeat the Borg by simply destroying their planets, their infratsructure, and hunting down their remaining fleets later. I mean thats what the Species did and they almost won with much fewer ships and less firepower.

[Darth Wong]

You are treating my very generous use of the TM's figures for photon torpedo firepower as a hard figure now, even though Pegasus actually indicates far, far lower yields.

Batman corrected me about this already. Fine, if we take 5 megaton yield of a photon torpedo (I assume this is the yield predicted by Pegasus since Batman mentioned it, if not then I apologize), that's twelve hits to destroy a Shadow vessel and three to cripple it. Even if we go to the hundreds of kilotons range, that just puts Borg cubes on par with Shadow heavy cruisers.

And the Vorlons are superior to the Shadows.

And if the Vorlons do have more firepower, it won't be by an order of magnitude, and the Borg have orders of magnitude more vessels and industrial capacity... I really don't see how the Vorlons can win.

Bullshit; how do the Borg have orders of magnitude more vessels than the Shadows' fleets of many thousands of ships? Don't give me this "millions of ships" garbage; that was a single line from Chakotay and it was speculative; he had no way of knowing the actual number. Moreover, the Vorlons have superior force concentration abilities; the Borg are fairly slow away from their conduits, and the Vorlons can choose the time and place of any combat by simply staying in hyperspace until they choose to attack.

[Stofsk]

Firepower estimates and numbers aren't everything; strategy DOES play a part, strangely enough.

Are the Shadow and Vorlon ships going to give the Borg easy targets?

Are the Borg going to try to conquer their space?

Are the Shadows/Vorlons trying to conquer THEIR space?

Simply saying "Borg torps and industry will rule" doesn't actually say anything. What's their strategy? Or are you saying it doesn't matter, Brian?

[Batman]

Yes it is. Wether or not the VPK is their main combat vessel is irrelevant. They were able to build it, thus they have the material science to do so.

Holy shit, I just checked on the VPK and its fucking 45 kilometers long assuming that +http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison_huge.gif is correct. Point for the Vorlons.

That figure is way out of line. Babtech has the VPK at 4.5 miles long. As your link has the Whitestar at 476 metres long their B5 sizes at the least are dubious.

FTL accelleration is a non-Newtonian phenomenon and thus need not apply any stress on the ship. Feel free to show how non-Newtonian effects are in any way dependent on the size/mass of the ship, or how they indicate physical durability.

Fine, that was a moronic comment. Will you accept that Borg sub-light acceleration requires that the Borg have more advanced materials science than the Feds?

As that need not be Newtonian either, sorry, no. For all we know they use some sort of gravimetric drive and the ship is in free fall all the time.
Then there's AMRE and SIF...
Anyway the point was NOT that the Borg have more advanced materials science than the Feds-I frankly don't give a damn either way-but that the ship size does NOT indicate they have more advanced materials science than the Vorlons.

As well, this may be a point for the Borg as well. The Borg's main combat vessel is much larger than the Vorlon's main combat vessel, but why? Why not have a larger vessel?

Because making a vessel larger just because is incredibly stupid?

The only reasons why I can think the Vorlons would want to make a vessel smaller is either for maneuverability, or perhaps limited resources.

Or maybe unlike you they understand that making a vessel larger than it needs to be is a useless waste of resources.

At the least, they should have several "battleship" class vessels other than their standard heavy cruiser, which we don't see.

Why? Especially since the only thing that heavy cruiser CAN'T anihilate in passing is a Shadow BattleCrab?

The VPK being a huge building that jumps in and out of hyperspace and maneuvers very little works, since IIRC we see VPK move at a snails pace compared to the heavy cruisers. On the opposite side, we have the Borg, whose primary combat vessel is much larger than the Vorlon heavy cruiser, and who have been seen to maneuver quickly in impulse (REF:VOY where the Borg cubes fly by Voyager).

Uh-huh. Your point being?

Either FTL DOES put a serious strain on the ship's spaceframe, in which case Borg hulls, not being ridiculously more resilient than Fed ones, need AMRE/SIF to stay intact, or it DOESN'T, in which case there's no reason to assume Borg ships are ridiculously more resilient in the first place.

False dilemma fallacy. It is not "The Borg rely on SIF as much as the Federation" or not, the Borg can use SIF without relying on it. We know that warp causes stresses on the ship (least to a shuttle) that can cause microfractures, so FTL does put strain on ship's hulls. The question is whether the Borg use SIF to the degree that the Feds do. The Federation relies on SIF to keep bulkheads together on a stationary space station for goodness sake. The Borg are stupid, but before assigning the Borg the level of stupidity that they rely on SIF to keep together a wall, burden of proof.

Pressuposing that they actually have the materials that allow them to go without SIF. The ammount of stress put on the hull (which IIRC as of VOy if nothing else does apply to full-size starships) is quite simply indeterminate without knowing the physical strength of the hull. They may simply have no other choice. As you are assuming that
a) Warp travel puts considerable stress on the hull,
b) Borg hulls can withstand that stress, and
c) do so without SIF support,
burden of proof is on you.

You ARE aware that this says nothing about Starfleet's alleged torpedo ships, of course.

Sure. If Starfleet has torpedo boats, they logically would have more torpedoes than a scout class vessel, or a Galaxy. If we see them have more torpedo launchers.

Which doesn't mean they actually have them.

No it's not. Wether for good or ill, Trek TMs have no canonicity whatsoever. They're quite simply worthless in a debate. I agree some of them are sorta useful (I personally rather like the E-D deck plans) but the fact remains that unless they're backed up by the TV series they might as well not exist.

We've seen Akiras on screen. Fine, point to you, but I remember in a previous thread when we were talking about phasers, either you or someone else brought up the TM and said that phaser rifles were just hand phasers with a stock and extra ammunition. If you didn't bring up this point, I certainly don't remember you disagreeing with it.

I have no idea what you're talking about but so what? If the TM information meshes with what's seen on-screen, there's nothing wrong with bringing it up. The information from the TMs is simply not canon. Unless you wish the return of the 1.02 GW type 10 phaser on the Galaxy class...

So? Everybody knows Voyager fired more torpedoes than she could possibly have carried. She also lost approximately three times the shuttles she had. They were obviously manufacturing replacements underway. Your point being?

A scout class vessel with 150 crew that has torpedo launchers means logically that ships with more crew have torpedo launchers and a higher payload.

As the Nimitz does NOT carry approximately a 1000 SM-2s, not it doesn't.
Payload is as required by the ship's mission, nothing more. Size factors into it only as a larger ship naturally has room for a larger payload. Wether or not it carries one is not decided by its size. Case in point: Enterprise-D, which is about an order of magnitude larger than Voyager, has only two torpedo launchers, and carries only 275 (IIRC) torpedoes. Why?
Because they didn't expect it to need more.

Not that the total amount of torpedoes carried has anything to do with the number you're capable of firing before your ship is destroyed...

Sure, a Borg ship can take down a Fed ship's shields in seconds. We've also seen certain Fed ships last long enough to fire their torpedoes.Defiant,

Which was specifically designed as an answer to the Borg threat, was a dedicated warship which the Feds apparently didn't have until then, and wasn't around for Wolf 359 to boot,

Akiras, Steamrunners and Sovereign come to mind.

None of which were at Wolf 359, assuming they even existed back then (the Sovereign definitely didn't.

Mirandas and I believe Nebulas are pieces of shit. Fed torpedo launchers launch around one torpedo per second, and looking at how long the Akiras and Streamrunners last in ST:FC, they have more than enough time to lob a huge payload at the Borg ship.

As they're not around, no.

So a Fed fleet approaching a Borg cube would likely have the majority of ships be able to launch an alpha strike before the Borg ship can destroy them all.

Hence the assumption that each of them has time to fire ten torpedoes.

Even assuming that a Borg ship can disable one ship every five seconds (ridiculous since Akiras, Steamrunners and Defiant last pretty long against the cube in ST:FC),

Which is irrrelevant for shiled strength estimates based on BOBW,

since each ship can fire a torpedo a second,

Which is pure assumption, unless you know the refire rate for every class present at Wold 359.

As no Sovereign was around for Wolf 359 that is relevant because of?

Irrelevant for Wolf 359. Sorry I didn't make that clearer, I'm not just talking about Wolf 359, I'm also been cross-referring to ST:FC battle.

You can either base your estimate on ST:FC or on Wolf 359. Pick one.
You can not use the firepower of ships in FC to estimate Borg shield strength at Wolf 359.

IIRC that battle lasted 10+ hours.

The battle lasted long enough for the E-E to get there, that's all we know.
Furthermore, as we have no clue how may and what kind of ships there were, how many of them were attacking at any given time, and how often they attacked, that information is quite simply worthless. Any estimate based on FC is 100 percent pure speculation.

I don't know how much more conservative you can get with estimates.

We could limit it to the shots actually seen fired and assume the lowest torpedo yield ever witnessed (which if we include ST V would be none whatsoever). Ten torpedoes each at 5 MT apiece is not overly conservative.

Take your 5 megaton figure,

Which is still rather high-end,

assume that one one ship was firing at a time at the Borg cube (meaning the battle was continuous)

For which there is no evidence one way OR the other,

and you still get a low gigaton shield estimate. Do we agree on the low gigaton shield estimate?

:roolseyes: No. I went through the calculations out of sheer boredom.
I already said I agree with single-figure GT shielding. You were just getting them the wrong way.

[Darth Wong]

I'm really sick of people saying that Borg cubes can maneuver quickly because they zipped past Voyager. The fact that this is a huge non sequitur does not seem to occur to them; do they even recognize the distinction between velocity and maneuverability, for fuck's sake?

[Darth Servo]

One thing that gets me is the assertion "lately the Borg have a bad track record assimilating biotech". Based on what? Species 8472? For fuck's sake, the Borg have encountered and classified over ten thousand species, with one from another dimension being resistant to typical assimilation attempts. I hardly call that a "bad" track record.

"Encountering and classifying" a species does not mean they've assimilated it.