Civ001 wrote:Yes I know this has been done before on spacebattles many times but I would like to know how what would happen if the Replicators from the Ida Galaxy got caught in a anomoly and was sent to the ST universe? Only one Replicator Crusier was sent and the first victim was a Borg scout ship like the one seen in STV. What will happen to the Borg than? Could Replicator nanite assimilate Borg nanites? On a scale of 1-10 how big of a threat are the Replicators to the Borg if 1 was the lowest and 10 was the highest. How will this battle be if the Replicators sent a whole fleet to the ST universe?
There's a problem here. You cannot ask if the Borg will be assimilated if they're already stated to be victim.
We just need to know what will happen first between the Replicator cruiser and the Borg ship and its crew.
With the presence of a humanoid Replicator, you add some reflexes to the Replicators which they didn't necessarily have before, in that they'd be more prompt to react to what would appear as a menace as generally understood by humans.
The cruiser itself has very little room to begin with. In fact, we don't even know if that small cramped room that we see in some episodes is always present; if anything, if Borg drones were to attempt to do anything while beaming there, they'd be automatically surrounded by bugs. Aside from the neons (which could just be a particular form of nanites made to emit light), everything is made of bug blocks.
But this is not even worth asking, because we know how both "species" behave in case of a first contact. The Replicators are far more aggressive. Upon first scan, they'll immediately detect plenty of tasty things and huge power sources. They'll either attempt a beaming procedure or shoot a dart. No doubt that the dart slamming into the hull of the Borg ship will be seen as an act of aggression as well.
If no dart is fired (the bugs can beam onto the Borg ship, which the E-D crew had no issue to achieve upon first contact), the bugs will spread and settle a queen to start using local materials to build their numbers. Needless to say that the Borg will immediately see this destruction of some sort as a menace and will still react in the end.
The replicators have the advantage of being able to swarm drones and being smaller than them. All a drone can hope to achieve is plant its tubules and make some connection. Bug spray has been known to "melt" through a wide variety of alloys, such as those built from trinium, naqahdah and even neutronium.
Borg drones will get swarmed before they even can attempt to plug anything. Their liability is in trying to make contact with the Replicator bugs.
Plus the bugs can also spray the fleshy tissues, which we know are essential to the cyborgs.
Replicator bugs make a connection with a system merely by walking over a console. A Borg drones still needs to deploy its tubules, so the bugs have the speed advantage here. Technically, this means no drone can defeat the bugs.
They already win at that human/pet scale.
On the larger scale, Replicators have the capacity to multiply their numbers stupidly fast, so much that within the minutes following Reese deactivating cameras from a distance, building bugs from the few located in her room, soldiers immediately sent to open the room as cameras fail, to those same soldiers suddenly attacked by a dozen bugs and more, Carter and co rushed towards the room and Carter considered that there could already be hundreds of them by now ("Menace").
So the Borg ship will be literally stuffed with bugs before they can even react in time and think of something to do.
What about the nanoscale?
Well, it's merely a question of size, again. Borg nanites connect with materials and establish connections.
We can't even know if trying to establish a connection will even work.
What we can know is that the Borg
nanoprobe is damn big.
It's at least several micrometers wide (see
here).
On the other hand, we don't know much about the bug's nanites, neither do we know more about the Asuran aside from their
aspect.
Not to say that the link between Asurans and MW/Ida Replicators isn't totally clear.
Reese, a robot with a body much capable of behaving like a human body, including realistic flesh, is lost somewhere in between.
She had the capacity to build Replicators as "toys" she used to defend herself and ordered to replicate when she felt threatened. She had her own
nanites, which seem to be considerably smaller than Borg nanoprobes, although she was nowhere near as tough as humanoids. She got killed/destroyed by mere gun fire. Her insides were advanced but not built to be a complete mass of small redundant machines like 100% nanites humanoids are.
If Replicator nanites are smaller, there's not much the nanoprobes could do besides being swarmed at their own scale.
If that's true, it's game over.
It is not clear why this matters though, since not all Borg tech is about nanoprobes. Most of the tech is easily accessible through a wide variety of consoles and other panels, and all it comes down to is encryption and computing power.
Replicators don't immediately gain control of advanced systems. However, one could say it's just a question of time since there doesn't seem to be anything the drones could do.
From there, if the Borg ship is converted, the bugs then know all there is to know from the Borg from that single ship, and we can only speculate as to what their next target would be.
The ship may get enhanced on the power generation side.