Borg Cubes have hulls open to space...the heck?

[seanrobertson]

You should probably be sterilized for admitting to reading Shatner ST novels.

In that case, I'd better be sterilized, too I read that book -- but in my defense, it was mostly just to see if the Kirk-wanking was as bad as I'd heard! (It was, and then some.)

The problem with Shatner's ghost-writer's explanation is that there were 40 ships at Wolf359. 39 were destroyed. The surviving ship is unidentified AFAIK, but I rather doubt she'd be considered a survivor if she'd been assimilated and mysteriously disappeared from the battlefield

[Crazedwraith]

The survivor is often assumed to be the USS Endeavor as Janeway once quoted her Captain's log about the Borg. And when Voyager left, First Contact hadn't happened.

Of course other people assume that there were more borg incursions off screen between Wolf 395 and First Contact and the Endeavor was involved in one of them.

[Captain Seafort]

The problem with Shatner's ghost-writer's explanation is that there were 40 ships at Wolf359. 39 were destroyed. The surviving ship is unidentified AFAIK, but I rather doubt she'd be considered a survivor if she'd been assimilated and mysteriously disappeared from the battlefield

Couple of things:

1) It's a minor nitpick, but there were two survivors from Wolf. The "39" comes from Satie's comment in The Drumhead that 39 ships were lost in the Borg attack, but the Lalo was lost before the battle.

2) Why should "destroyed" equate to "wreckage found"? If there was no sign of a ship after the battle then it's likely Starfleet would count it as destroyed and vaporised.

[seanrobertson]

Couple of things:

1) It's a minor nitpick, but there were two survivors from Wolf. The "39" comes from Satie's comment in The Drumhead that 39 ships were lost in the Borg attack, but the Lalo was lost before the battle.

Oh, okay. I was thinking 39 ships were lost at Wolf359 alone.

The script:

ADMIRAL SATIE
Captain Picard... have you fully
recovered from your experience
with the Borg?

STAR TREK: "The Drumhead" - REV. 2/25/91 - ACT FIVE 55.

31 CONTINUED: (5)

Picard's eyes go cold.

PICARD
Yes. I am fully recovered.

ADMIRAL SATIE
It must have been awful...
actually becoming one of them...
being forced to use your vast
knowledge of Starfleet operations
to aid the Borg...

Picard has assumed a tight masque. Satie, carrying
her Padd, moves in the general direction of the
visiting Starfleet Admiral, playing to him but not
being obvious about it.

ADMIRAL SATIE
Just how many of our ships were
destroyed?
(checks Padd)
...ah. I have it...
thirty-nine... with the loss of
life measured at nearly eleven
thousand...

She pauses to let this sink in. There is a stirring
among the audience. She looks toward the Admiral,
begins talking about Picard in the third person.

ADMIRAL SATIE
One wonders how this man can sleep
at night... having caused so much
destruction...

From that, I gather Satie means 39 ships were destroyed while Picard was Locutus, which of course would not include the Lalo. Blaming her destruction on Picard wouldn't make any sense.

2) Why should "destroyed" equate to "wreckage found"? If there was no sign of a ship after the battle then it's likely Starfleet would count it as destroyed and vaporised.

You're quite right. I blithely assumed from the amount of wrecks present that there'd be trace enough to account for 39 of the 40 ships, but that was silly of me. One good Borg disruptor blast to a warp core and BOOM, the likelihood of that ship being accounted for is next to nil. In that light, the Shatner book could very well be on the money. After all, the Borg DO sometimes assimilate their victims' ships, although we've only seen that when the Borg in question lacked a proper Borg vessel of their own (e.g., the drones in "Regeneration" or "First Contact").

[seanrobertson]

The survivor is often assumed to be the USS Endeavor as Janeway once quoted her Captain's log about the Borg. And when Voyager left, First Contact hadn't happened.

Of course other people assume that there were more borg incursions off screen between Wolf 395 and First Contact and the Endeavor was involved in one of them.

Ah, yes! Thank you, Crazedwraith. The Endeavor. I remember some of those discussions now, and I certainly remember Janeway quoting her captain about the Borg in "Scorpion." Sources on the Internet spell his name Asamov. I reckon they either meant "Asimov" or uncharacteristically decided that spelling would be too cheeky

[Captain Seafort]

From that, I gather Satie means 39 ships were destroyed while Picard was Locutus, which of course would not include the Lalo. Blaming her destruction on Picard wouldn't make any sense.

It wouldn't, but Satie was more than a touch unstable, and had a track record in the episode of not letting minor trivialities like facts get in way of her interrogations. Attributing all the losses suffered during the Borg attack to Picard personally would be in keeping with her approach.

[seanrobertson]

From that, I gather Satie means 39 ships were destroyed while Picard was Locutus, which of course would not include the Lalo. Blaming her destruction on Picard wouldn't make any sense.

It wouldn't, but Satie was more than a touch unstable, and had a track record in the episode of not letting minor trivialities like facts get in way of her interrogations. Attributing all the losses suffered during the Borg attack to Picard personally would be in keeping with her approach.

Possibly. She was truly unhinged at that point, to say nothing after Picard quoted her Daddy to her and she went totally nuts.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Further memory-searching reveals that the starship I was referring to was the USS Hogarth. Picard looks at a Borg shipyard and sees something in the distance that resembles a borgified Miranda class. He then think that the USS Hogarth was a Miranda class starships lost at Wolf 359 with no wreckage ever found.

[Jedipilot24]

There's a theory I read somewhere that speculates that there were, in fact, TWO battles at Wolf 359. In the first one the Borg took their time assimilating each ship as it attacked and this delayed them long enough for the Klingons and the E-D to arrive and finish the cube off. The Queen and a selection of drones escaped in the sphere and traveled back in time to tell the incoming cube to just destroy the ships as they attacked. Then the sphere returned to the DQ while the cube continued on. Then there was the 'second' battle of Wolf 359, which is what we actually see in the episode. Since the Borg aren't wasting time, they plow through the fleet much faster and so the Klingons and the E-D don't arrive in time.

This explains both the Queen's comment to Picard in FC and also why Voyager later encountered a group of ex-Borg who had been assimilated at Wolf-359.

This also means that we shift to an alternate timeline in BOBW and that some people living in the AQ have duplicates living as drones or ex-drones in the DQ.

This theory also speculates that the Borg Nanoprobes that featured so prominently in Voyager were inspired by Picard's knowledge of Wesley Crusher's nanites.

[Darth Tanner]

the Klingons and the E-D to arrive and finish the cube off

Why would the Klingons and the Ent D be able to destroy the cube when the Federation fleet failed completely? Let alone why would the Queen abandon her vessel and return to the DQ during an at that point succesful invasion?

[Baffalo]

the Klingons and the E-D to arrive and finish the cube off

Why would the Klingons and the Ent D be able to destroy the cube when the Federation fleet failed completely? Let alone why would the Queen abandon her vessel and return to the DQ during an at that point succesful invasion?

Unless Klingon disruptors are somehow more powerful against the Cube than phasers, there's no real reason. If they are indeed more powerful, going back in time might have been beneficial to the Borg, since the Federation seems to be their ultimate target and not the Klingon Empire. Since no on-screen battles with the Klingons are shown (though implied given that there are Klingon Borg), we don't know how effective those disruptors are in relation to phasers.

Unless the Ent-D somehow helped the Klingon fleet achieve victory, then I don't really see how this scenario works unless they got off a lucky shot. Or they lucked out in having different tactics than the Federation. Or the Queen just said, "Fuck it, I'm going home." Too much speculation without any concrete evidence.

[Prometheus Unbound]

Since no on-screen battles with the Klingons are shown (though implied given that there are Klingon Borg), we don't know how effective those disruptors are in relation to phasers.

Whilst it was re-used stock footage of The Way of the Warrior, in VOY's Unity (I think) it showed a Klingon fleet battling a Cube.

[seanrobertson]

There's a theory I read somewhere that speculates that there were, in fact, TWO battles at Wolf 359. In the first one the Borg took their time assimilating each ship as it attacked and this delayed them long enough for the Klingons and the E-D to arrive and finish the cube off. The Queen and a selection of drones escaped in the sphere and traveled back in time to tell the incoming cube to just destroy the ships as they attacked. Then the sphere returned to the DQ while the cube continued on. Then there was the 'second' battle of Wolf 359, which is what we actually see in the episode. Since the Borg aren't wasting time, they plow through the fleet much faster and so the Klingons and the E-D don't arrive in time.

This explains both the Queen's comment to Picard in FC and also why Voyager later encountered a group of ex-Borg who had been assimilated at Wolf-359.

This also means that we shift to an alternate timeline in BOBW and that some people living in the AQ have duplicates living as drones or ex-drones in the DQ.

This theory also speculates that the Borg Nanoprobes that featured so prominently in Voyager were inspired by Picard's knowledge of Wesley Crusher's nanites.

I've heard that explanation before.

IMO, it begs the question: why didn't the Queen send yet another timeship back when Data accessed the Collective via Locutus? Even though his access was limited to low-priority directives (e.g., "sleep"/regenerate), the Queen had to know such access could doom that cube, too, right?

I mean, in fairness, she IS the Collective, so she could override any order Data tried to plant. And contrary to Dr. Crusher's off-the-cuff guess in that episode, the Queen COULD have simply cut Locutus' access to the Hive Mind, just as she did a drone or more in "Unimatrix Zero" (to say nothing of the several hundred thousand Borg she terminated through self-destruct ops).

My only guess is that the Queen never thought Data, whom Locutus regarded as a "primitive artificial lifeform, obsolete in the 'new order'," could be a threat. By the time he gave the order to sleep, she realized she'd underestimated him and initiated the cube's self-destruct, which the E-D crew interpreted as a "feedback loop."

The whole nanoprobe thing is bogus, however. We know they and assimilation tubules used well before the encounter at J-25; e.g., flashbacks and statements from "Dark Frontier" and "The Raven" among others. Why we didn't see Picard jabbed in the neck with the things is extremely simple:

A. We didn't exactly see every part of his assimilation process, did we? Back when I had a perforated colon in August '08, my doctor "fed" me IV opiates roughly every four hours for 6-7 days straight. But he didn't film that. Neither did any of my nurses or visitors (I was certainly in no shape to film anything; I was lucky if I was coherent).

Are we to assume, then, I never received potent pain-killers "offscreen," particularly in spite of the fact my pain levels were literally side-splitting at the time?

B. Recall the dialogue from "First Contact." The Queen didn't want just another drone in Picard; she wanted a kind of counterpart. As such, it stands to reason that, while he was assimilated and largely under Borg control, they didn't go "all out" in turning him into one of them. This is quite obviously evident in the tears we see him shed AND his freedom enough to say, "Sleep. SLEEP, Data." That's far more freedom than we've ever seen from a Borg still hooked up to the Hive Mind. Even "Hugh" took some time, in complete isolation, to begin to display the vestiges of individuality.

[seanrobertson]

Since no on-screen battles with the Klingons are shown (though implied given that there are Klingon Borg), we don't know how effective those disruptors are in relation to phasers.

Whilst it was re-used stock footage of The Way of the Warrior, in VOY's Unity (I think) it showed a Klingon fleet battling a Cube.

That's correct.

We've seen assimilated Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and, some time after the Voyager ran into the Hirogen, assimilated Hirogen, too. The Borg get around. But then, space is big. For all we know, they only had one or two major skirmishes with any of the aforementioned parties, assimilated their goodies and took their swag back to the Delta Quadrant.

Personally, I am glad the Romulans returned as a major adversary in TNG. They were a part of so many good stories, perhaps my favorite of which is "The Defector." But according to some early TNG script spitballing, at least as I understand it, the Borg were to have originally all but destroyed the Romulans, including their homeworld, and they were only able to stop the Borg at the cost of themselves. That set up Picard and company to discover the secret the Romulans apparently took to their graves.

That might make better sense in some post-TNG materials, especially since those seem really fond of nerfing the Romulans (e.g., the Trek reboot and that stupid Hobus supernova, the Narada et al.). Besides, I could never see TPTB really running with the storyline I mentioned. Remember how Berman wanted the entire Dominion War wrapped in a couple of episodes?