The Borg: breaking the no limits fallacy

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'm looking for cases of Borg shields, be it on ships or drones, being defeated by weapons or natural phenomena which are nothing surprising to them (read: they would not have to adapt to them, either because they already did, or because there's nothing magic/weird about what hit them).

Think of anything, heat, momentum, etc.

Title edited. I think "Brog" is inaccurate.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

I'm looking for cases of Borg shields, be it on ships or drones, being defeated by weapons or natural phenomena which are nothing surprising to them (read: they would not have to adapt to them, either because they already did, or because there's nothing magic/weird about what hit them).

Think of anything, heat, momentum, etc.

The exploding planet in scorpoin pt1 blew up 2 cubes, however the ejecta that hit the cube holding voyager just before the planet explodes seems to do no damage or actually not hit it at all but burn up if you look closely.

It does rock the borg cube though and causes janeway to stumble.

[Mike DiCenso]

We've already established in another thread that the Borg can handle about 12 teratons of energy as a generous upper limit, though that did take the assumption that the two Borg cubes that were destroyed by the planet's explosion were further from the planet than they really were. So your milage will vary.
-Mike

[Trinoya]

I found it most interesting that the borg were able to walk outside in space on the ENT E, and that says nothing of those borg that survive the descent through earths atmosphere and also subsequently a hundred years frozen in the arctic..

[Mr. Oragahn]

Remember, I also established that nothing in that sequence showed material hitting the Cubes fast enough to warrant such figures. The first batch of glowing debris (ejecta of molten and solid debris) flew from the planet at a planetary radius over several seconds, but hit the soon to escape Cube at a much inferior speed, about 10 frames to cover 344 meters (and I won't annoy you on the fact that these once again screwed scales resulted in that nation wide ejecta all neatly hitting the Cube and only the Cube).
Hence ejecta was slowed down.
But that's not what got the better end of the two other Cubes.
What blew them up was that expanding white sphere resulting from the planet's destruction.
In order for the speed of the whitish wall of whatizit to make sense, we have to claim that it slowed down. Clearly, it did, since it took about five frames for the white wall of doom to cover the first two Cubes' entire lengths before they blew up from within.
If a Cube is 3 km long, that makes a speed of 14,385.6 m/s (framerate at 23.976 fps).
And we don't even know what that white thing is, nor the concentration of matter that hit it. It's not particularly opaque, and there aren't much debris to see approaching the first two Cubes to begin with. We see some as the third and Voyager escape, but those are fairly large and would have easily been spotted in proximity of the first two Cubes, since they seem to be about Voyager sized (300~400 m).
I don't want to be hard on you, but there's nothing conclusive that would warrant a claim for teratons. There's no doubt they're beasts of war, for their capacity to soak up countless megaton range torps, but the Cube in FC was getting its hull hit, with shields down, and I doubt the Starfleet crafts had dumped about a million torpedoes into the Borg ship. Even claiming a thousand of them would be a super stretch, considering how long the ships last against a Cube - about what? a picosecond. :p

Erm, well...

So, anything else, like phasers defeating drone shields or something?
Or other things crashing into Cubes? What about those bioships?

[Roondar]

Yup, a Borg thread. Always a good way to stop my non-posting stint :P

At least one borg ship, as far as I can tell that is, did not survive crashlanding into a planet. To be fair, I don't know how they managed to crash land so it's not a certainty that they still had shields at the time.

(another problem being I have no clue in which episode this happened, I just know it did)

Other than that we have the Borg sphere in FC being blown up by some quantum torpedoes, though its shields status is an unknown.

We also have the Borc cube in FC being overwhelmed by UFP firepower. Note here that it's obvious the fighting took quite a while, what with the E-E needing to warp in from an unknown distance near the Romulan border, so thousands of torpedoes might actually be a lot closer to the amount they absorbed than you'd like to think. It's certainly going to be north of a hundred in any case - even the mere minutes of the battle we do see have them taking 30 or so. And this is including the bit where Picard stops the fighting and are only the hits we directly observe (and not say, the bits where we only see hero dialog but the fighting is still going on).

And last but not least we have the Borg Sphere being blown up by a single Mark VI Photon Torpedo beamed into it. The assumption here being that this weapon would not be able to do so when used against the ship in ordinary combat. The interesting bit here is that this is a weapon the Borg have already seen quite a few of and that it still managed to be plenty, as long as it was detonated from within - lending credibility to the Borg being far more limited when their 'adpation shields' are not used. Like say when absorbing solar plasma or bits of an exploding planet?

--

As a sidenote regarding FC:
It's quite obvious that the UFP beat the cube's shields, but it's equally obvious that the cube's damage resistance is quite high. Just the observed photon torpedo hits put the absorbed quantity of damage well into the hundreds of megatons (asuming a low 10MT per torpedo, rising with yield). If the UFP fields torpedoes closer to the ones used in Voyager to kill the Rise asteriod (50-150MT), we're comfortably into the GT range. And this is just the few hits we see on screen, not the ones alleged to take place earlier while the E-E is not present or the ones we don't see while we focus on the 'heroes' during the battle.

[Mike DiCenso]

Remember, I also established that nothing in that sequence showed material hitting the Cubes fast enough to warrant such figures. The first batch of glowing debris (ejecta of molten and solid debris) flew from the planet at a planetary radius over several seconds, but hit the soon to escape Cube at a much inferior speed, about 10 frames to cover 344 meters (and I won't annoy you on the fact that these once again screwed scales resulted in that nation wide ejecta all neatly hitting the Cube and only the Cube).
Hence ejecta was slowed down.
But that's not what got the better end of the two other Cubes.
What blew them up was that expanding white sphere resulting from the planet's destruction.
In order for the speed of the whitish wall of whatizit to make sense, we have to claim that it slowed down. Clearly, it did, since it took about five frames for the white wall of doom to cover the first two Cubes' entire lengths before they blew up from within.
If a Cube is 3 km long, that makes a speed of 14,385.6 m/s (framerate at 23.976 fps).
And we don't even know what that white thing is, nor the concentration of matter that hit it. It's not particularly opaque, and there aren't much debris to see approaching the first two Cubes to begin with. We see some as the third and Voyager escape, but those are fairly large and would have easily been spotted in proximity of the first two Cubes, since they seem to be about Voyager sized (300~400 m).
I don't want to be hard on you, but there's nothing conclusive that would warrant a claim for teratons. There's no doubt they're beasts of war, for their capacity to soak up countless megaton range torps, but the Cube in FC was getting its hull hit, with shields down, and I doubt the Starfleet crafts had dumped about a million torpedoes into the Borg ship. Even claiming a thousand of them would be a super stretch, considering how long the ships last against a Cube - about what? a picosecond. :p

I also showed you in turn how you were wrong in your perception of that. The other cubes were clearly much further behind the Voyager-towing cube. They are not a mere 400 meters wide, that is simply wrong on your part. The energy from the final blast would require some 1e32 to 1e36 J total, and the Borg would be taking at least 12 teratons from that in the form of various types of radiation.

As for the torpedoes, given the yields we've bandied around here, it is quite possible that several teratons were expended against the Borg over time. For example, let's just say that the fleet that intercepted the Borg had 100 ships originally (quite possible given the causalties they suffered in just a few minutes of fighting), and let us then assume that there is an average of 150-200 torpedoes per ship in the fleet, which then gives us a rather whopping 15,000 to 20,000 torpedoes, not including at hundreds to thousands of phasers being fired at the damn thing (you created a False Dilemma earlier in the assumption that only torpedoes were in use against the cube ship). Thus if we use the lower limits of around 44 megatons per torp we find that at least 660,000 MT (660 gigatons) was expended in fighting the cube.

Of course if we go with some of the upper limits for torpedoes and assume more than 20,000 were fired at the cube, then we wind up with well over 2 teratons expended against the cube, not including phasers, which can be expected to add at least a another 5 to 10% above and beyond that.

So you see you can play with the numbers however you like in order to get the result you want.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

At least one borg ship, as far as I can tell that is, did not survive crashlanding into a planet. To be fair, I don't know how they managed to crash land so it's not a certainty that they still had shields at the time.

(another problem being I have no clue in which episode this happened, I just know it did)

That was in "I, Borg". There was little, if any indication as to what happened when it crashed. Given that the scout cubed massed out at 2.5 million metric tons, it would have had quite a bit of KE behind it when it hit the planet.

And last but not least we have the Borg Sphere being blown up by a single Mark VI Photon Torpedo beamed into it.

That was not a Borg sphere that was destroyed that way, it was a much smaller probe ship as seen here in this video. The goal had been to capture Borg technology, but the torpedo apparently caused more damage than they had wanted:

CHAKOTAY: I thought we were trying to disable it.

SEVEN: The torpedo detonated near the power matrix. It caused a chain reaction.

JANEWAY: Survivors.

TUVOK: None.

JANEWAY: Debris status.

KIM: There's a few components intact but they're badly damaged.

JANEWAY: Begin a salvage operation.

CHAKOTAY: Captain?

JANEWAY: There might be something we can use weapons, a transwarp coil. I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel lucky today.

So likely this was not even anywhere near a full-yield torp.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Remember, I also established that nothing in that sequence showed material hitting the Cubes fast enough to warrant such figures. The first batch of glowing debris (ejecta of molten and solid debris) flew from the planet at a planetary radius over several seconds, but hit the soon to escape Cube at a much inferior speed, about 10 frames to cover 344 meters (and I won't annoy you on the fact that these once again screwed scales resulted in that nation wide ejecta all neatly hitting the Cube and only the Cube).
Hence ejecta was slowed down.
But that's not what got the better end of the two other Cubes.
What blew them up was that expanding white sphere resulting from the planet's destruction.
In order for the speed of the whitish wall of whatizit to make sense, we have to claim that it slowed down. Clearly, it did, since it took about five frames for the white wall of doom to cover the first two Cubes' entire lengths before they blew up from within.
If a Cube is 3 km long, that makes a speed of 14,385.6 m/s (framerate at 23.976 fps).
And we don't even know what that white thing is, nor the concentration of matter that hit it. It's not particularly opaque, and there aren't much debris to see approaching the first two Cubes to begin with. We see some as the third and Voyager escape, but those are fairly large and would have easily been spotted in proximity of the first two Cubes, since they seem to be about Voyager sized (300~400 m).
I don't want to be hard on you, but there's nothing conclusive that would warrant a claim for teratons. There's no doubt they're beasts of war, for their capacity to soak up countless megaton range torps, but the Cube in FC was getting its hull hit, with shields down, and I doubt the Starfleet crafts had dumped about a million torpedoes into the Borg ship. Even claiming a thousand of them would be a super stretch, considering how long the ships last against a Cube - about what? a picosecond. :p

I also showed you in turn how you were wrong in your perception of that. The other cubes were clearly much further behind the Voyager-towing cube.

Irrelevant. What matters is how fast the Cubes were caught up by the mystery wave. This, I'm afraid, is very easy to observe.
5 frames, no more, no less.

They are not a mere 400 meters wide, that is simply wrong on your part.

Where do you think I estimated a Cube to be 400 meters wide? We're talking in another thread where I have shown I know the Voyager is 344 meters long, and that ship is small in comparison to the Cube that's tugging it. I always go with Cubes 3km wide. Always. Hence my relative speed figure for the wall.
The only time I use the 400 m figure in my former post is as the higher bracket of a range that determines the size of observable debris.

The energy from the final blast would require some 1e32 to 1e36 J total, and the Borg would be taking at least 12 teratons from that in the form of various types of radiation.

The figure you obtain is for overcoming gravitational binding energy in a more or less violent fashion, and it's largely about kinetic energy.
Since you don't know how much radiations are part of the whole energy figure, you cannot claim any shield resistance figure based on said radiations.
Not to say that claiming teratons is not working since we see the towing Cube formerly hit by debris which are nowhere near that powerful in terms of sheer energy, and they slam against the Cube, rocking it hard. Point? These impacts, albeit considerably weaker than teratons, are not negligible. People inside the Cube notice them very well.
We're left with the energy being mainly kinetic in nature anyway.

We can also consider - safely - that the expanding matter is slowed down. This, because in the video, as I already said in the other thread, if the ships were flying away from the planet at a speed that would make them barely reachable by a wave that travels several planetary radii per second, the camera following the Cubes group would also be moving away from the planet at a similar and considerable speed, and therefore you would easily see the planet shrink in the background.

As for the torpedoes, given the yields we've bandied around here, it is quite possible that several teratons were expended against the Borg over time. For example, let's just say that the fleet that intercepted the Borg had 100 ships originally (quite possible given the causalties they suffered in just a few minutes of fighting), and let us then assume that there is an average of 150-200 torpedoes per ship in the fleet, which then gives us a rather whopping 15,000 to 20,000 torpedoes, not including at hundreds to thousands of phasers being fired at the damn thing (you created a False Dilemma earlier in the assumption that only torpedoes were in use against the cube ship). Thus if we use the lower limits of around 44 megatons per torp we find that at least 660,000 MT (660 gigatons) was expended in fighting the cube.

Of course if we go with some of the upper limits for torpedoes and assume more than 20,000 were fired at the cube, then we wind up with well over 2 teratons expended against the cube, not including phasers, which can be expected to add at least a another 5 to 10% above and beyond that.

So you see you can play with the numbers however you like in order to get the result you want.
-Mike

Fine. All this is quite a large package of extreme high ends.

1. First, we know that the Borg had already adapted to the UFP tech in and out to know how to defend themselves against photon torps and phasers. We know that under such conditions, a Cube easily swathes UFP ships like flies. Especially since the UFP fields many decade old ships, such as Miranda-class ones. Refit or not, they're not going to be as good as ships built from scratch to accomodate the newer breakthroughs in technology.
2. Secondly, you're assuming 100 ships. Evidence of that figure would be required.
3. Thirdly, you assume all those ships arrived at the same time. Is it at least confirmed? It matters for two reasons:
   1. If the UFP ships didn't arrive all at once, the Cube would have had a much easier job at blowing them up one by one.
   2. The Cube would regenerate between each attack.
4. Fourthly, with all these factors concerned, you assume that each ship fired its entire stock of torpedoes.
   1. It's largely unlikely, if only for the fact that it's not how we see UFP ships behave, even when they're fighting a powerful enemy they fully know they must not let pass. You see how ships behave in FC: they don't even try to fire at the same spot, and they clearly don't spam the target with everything they have.
   2. It's also terribly unlikely because of point 1: ships don't survive long enough to fire all they have.
5. You believe I established a false dilemma by ignoring phasers. This is not correct.
   1. I don't mention phasers because I view them as not any better than torps, especially when their NDF effect is totally nullified by Borg defenses.
   2. The false dilemma is also established by the show and movies: it's very rare that both weapons get fired at the same time.
6. Finally, you assume that a low end yield is about 44 megatons, but such is not the case at all. You can easily find one digit megaton range calcs for the torpedoes, and even from episodes such as Rise.

That's quite a lot of factors which can easily bring the entire shield strength many notches down.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yup, a Borg thread. Always a good way to stop my non-posting stint :P

Anytime. ^_^

At least one borg ship, as far as I can tell that is, did not survive crashlanding into a planet. To be fair, I don't know how they managed to crash land so it's not a certainty that they still had shields at the time.

Other than that we have the Borg sphere in FC being blown up by some quantum torpedoes, though its shields status is an unknown.

Right.
That said, people explain the low yields by saying that weapons were drained. A better explanation is that the Borg didn't plan to destroy more than necessary, as they'd assimilate the low tech later on, since they'd only have to bring some modification to the Phoenix to get a free new ship.

We also have the Borc cube in FC being overwhelmed by UFP firepower. Note here that it's obvious the fighting took quite a while, what with the E-E needing to warp in from an unknown distance near the Romulan border, so thousands of torpedoes might actually be a lot closer to the amount they absorbed than you'd like to think. It's certainly going to be north of a hundred in any case - even the mere minutes of the battle we do see have them taking 30 or so. And this is including the bit where Picard stops the fighting and are only the hits we directly observe (and not say, the bits where we only see hero dialog but the fighting is still going on).

Hundreds seems about right.

And last but not least we have the Borg Sphere being blown up by a single Mark VI Photon Torpedo beamed into it. The assumption here being that this weapon would not be able to do so when used against the ship in ordinary combat. The interesting bit here is that this is a weapon the Borg have already seen quite a few of and that it still managed to be plenty, as long as it was detonated from within - lending credibility to the Borg being far more limited when their 'adpation shields' are not used. Like say when absorbing solar plasma or bits of an exploding planet?

Good point, especially since the yield was nowhere high. There's not even a question of curiosity, since they fully knew what that ship was about, and have already dealt with UFP weapons more than once. That said, I think it's clear that they didn't raise internal shields. They didn't even try to assimilate the torp or beam it out.

As a sidenote regarding FC:
It's quite obvious that the UFP beat the cube's shields, but it's equally obvious that the cube's damage resistance is quite high. Just the observed photon torpedo hits put the absorbed quantity of damage well into the hundreds of megatons (asuming a low 10MT per torpedo, rising with yield). If the UFP fields torpedoes closer to the ones used in Voyager to kill the Rise asteriod (50-150MT), we're comfortably into the GT range. And this is just the few hits we see on screen, not the ones alleged to take place earlier while the E-E is not present or the ones we don't see while we focus on the 'heroes' during the battle.

In my opinion, factors that allow a Cube to take a pounding, even with shields down, is that it can regenerate, that it has a lot of mass (it's big) and its outer hull is full of redundancies.
Considering the regeneration we've seen in "Q Who?" and how the Borg can grow stuff out of nowhere, it's actually very easy to declare the Cube could have been heavily damaged since its last battle, and regenerated enroute to Earth. A Cube is still combat effective with only 20% of its structural integrity up, isn't it? Claiming that it was near pristine as it left its former battle is another high end to add to the list above.

That was not a Borg sphere that was destroyed that way, it was a much smaller probe ship as seen here in this video. The goal had been to capture Borg technology, but the torpedo apparently caused more damage than they had wanted:

CHAKOTAY: I thought we were trying to disable it.

SEVEN: The torpedo detonated near the power matrix. It caused a chain reaction.

JANEWAY: Survivors.

TUVOK: None.

JANEWAY: Debris status.

KIM: There's a few components intact but they're badly damaged.

JANEWAY: Begin a salvage operation.

CHAKOTAY: Captain?

JANEWAY: There might be something we can use weapons, a transwarp coil. I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel lucky today.

So likely this was not even anywhere near a full-yield torp.
-Mike

It's interesting that a Voyager sized Borg ship can't stand a very low yield bomb exploding near its power matrix. We can easily gauge the explosion of the torpedo. It obviously was dialed down to some megajoules, not even worth an antitank round. Everything else is about the chain reaction. Most likely, the heavy grenade level explosion was supposed to damage the power matrix to disable the entire ship, not cause a chain reaction.

[Mike DiCenso]

First, we know that the Borg had already adapted to the UFP tech in and out to know how to defend themselves against photon torps and phasers. We know that under such conditions, a Cube easily swathes UFP ships like flies. Especially since the UFP fields many decade old ships, such as Miranda-class ones. Refit or not, they're not going to be as good as ships built from scratch to accomodate the newer breakthroughs in technology.

All right, the first part has little to no bearing on the situation, other than reinforcing that the Borg cube will be very tough to defeat and making the state of the heavily damaged outer hull and fluctuating power by that point in the fight rather impressive. It shows that at least Starfleet is making progress in learning how to fight the Borg and it shows that had Picard not been assimilated in BoBW, the 40 ship fleet amassed at Wolf 359 likely would have been far more effective without the Borg possessing his knowledge.

The issue of older, less capable starships involved is a legitimate one, however the battle seen here has very few older ships. I think one or two Mirandas are visible, but no Excelsiors, Ambassadors, or Connies at all in this fight... unless they were all wiped out very early on.

Secondly, you're assuming 100 ships. Evidence of that figure would be required.
Thirdly, you assume all those ships arrived at the same time. Is it at least confirmed? It matters for two reasons:

If the UFP ships didn't arrive all at once, the Cube would have had a much easier job at blowing them up one by one.

Again, please refer to the video and what happens in it. At least 40 starships are there, a good number of which are known to have been destroyed or disabled before the E-E arrived and after. Simple numbers and some reasonable assumptions, such as the fact that we know the Federation by this point in time was assembling large fleets of 100-326 ships or more to deal with the Dominion threat as well as the skirmishing with the Klingons. Given the high casualties seen there, the fleet would have had to have started with a fairly large size as they lost nearly a dozen ships in a mere 2 minutes of fighting. Assuming only 2 ships lost every 2 minutes, and the battle lasted at least an hour, then you have 30 starships lost. If 2 hours, then 60.

Second, other than the E-E arriving late, there is nothing to indicate piece meal arrivial of ships. I would require proof of that.

The Cube would regenerate between each attack.
Fourthly, with all these factors concerned, you assume that each ship fired its entire stock of torpedoes.

More accurately, I'm actually averaging given that smaller ships likely have only between 40-100 torpedoes, while the larger ships, like a Sovereign, Akira, and Galaxy have loadouts around 250. Given the rates of fire we've discussed in other thread, 2 minutes is more than enough time for a ship to unload torpedoes with.

It's largely unlikely, if only for the fact that it's not how we see UFP ships behave, even when they're fighting a powerful enemy they fully know they must not let pass. You see how ships behave in FC: they don't even try to fire at the same spot, and they clearly don't spam the target with everything they have.
It's also terribly unlikely because of point 1: ships don't survive long enough to fire all they have.

As per the dialog in the video clip I provided, the Admiral's ship had been destroyed, it is obvious that the chain of command had started breaking down for the fleet until the E-E arrived and Picard took command of the situation and was able to coordinate a strike on the previously unknown vunerable spot. In counterpoint, many of the ships we do see have survived since the begining of the fight and probably have fired off everything they have, or nearly so. Again, see my point on averages.

You believe I established a false dilemma by ignoring phasers. This is not correct.[
I don't mention phasers because I view them as not any better than torps, especially when their NDF effect is totally nullified by Borg defenses.
The false dilemma is also established by the show and movies: it's very rare that both
weapons get fired at the same time.

It is a False Dilemma since you have in the past blatently ignored the fact that there is a considerable DET component to phaser beams. We already know that a tiny rifle routinely is capable of 1.05 MW, while a narrowest of margins variance in output of the second largest phaser array on a GCS is 60 GW. The fact that we see them firing both torpedoes and phasers at the Borg cube at the end of the battle in the clip provided shows that at the least they alternated quickly between the two.

Finally, you assume that a low end yield is about 44 megatons, but such is not the case at all. You can easily find one digit megaton range calcs for the torpedoes, and even from episodes such as Rise.

So what? Those are very extreme lower limits for torps for reasons we've already hashed out elsewhere that were based on fudging every possible disadvantage to weaken Trek. 44-100 megatons when all else is factored into the matter is a good average range. If you like, I can go over the numbers again, assuming 500-1,000 MT plus yield torpedoes, which are all possible given the upper range limits for torps as per a number of calcs. That would mean 50 or more teratons.

That's quite a lot of factors which can easily bring the entire shield strength many notches down.

But not enough to matter as demonstrated above.
-Mike

[KirkSkyWalker]

I'm looking for cases of Borg shields, be it on ships or drones, being defeated by weapons or natural phenomena which are nothing surprising to them (read: they would not have to adapt to them, either because they already did, or because there's nothing magic/weird about what hit them).

Think of anything, heat, momentum, etc.

In "Descent, Pt. II," the Borg are unable to follow the Enterprise into a star's corona; however maybe these were Borg that were separated from the collective, so they couldn't adapt.

Likewise in First Contact, Worf defeats a Borg Drone simply by pulling a knife on him; there's nothing weird or magical about that.

[Mike DiCenso]

In "Descent, Pt. II," the Borg are unable to follow the Enterprise into a star's corona; however maybe these were Borg that were separated from the collective, so they couldn't adapt.

They were Borg seperated from the Collective. They showed little or none of the abilities of drones who are a part of it. Hell, the ship they were flying around in looked exactly like one of their 5 milllion isoton multikinetic neutronic mines! Also the star both the E-D and rogue Borg's ship were flying towards was highly unusual, both in the color as well as the high 12,000 degree C + temperature it heated the hull of the E-D to.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

First, we know that the Borg had already adapted to the UFP tech in and out to know how to defend themselves against photon torps and phasers. We know that under such conditions, a Cube easily swathes UFP ships like flies. Especially since the UFP fields many decade old ships, such as Miranda-class ones. Refit or not, they're not going to be as good as ships built from scratch to accomodate the newer breakthroughs in technology.

All right, the first part has little to no bearing on the situation, other than reinforcing that the Borg cube will be very tough to defeat and making the state of the heavily damaged outer hull and fluctuating power by that point in the fight rather impressive. It shows that at least Starfleet is making progress in learning how to fight the Borg and it shows that had Picard not been assimilated in BoBW, the 40 ship fleet amassed at Wolf 359 likely would have been far more effective without the Borg possessing his knowledge.

Do we know for a fact that the Borg gained anything of substance that gave them a upper hand for that battle?

The issue of older, less capable starships involved is a legitimate one, however the battle seen here has very few older ships. I think one or two Mirandas are visible, but no Excelsiors, Ambassadors, or Connies at all in this fight... unless they were all wiped out very early on.

It is Earth. It's expected to be protected by the best ships out there. Plus it was six years after Wolf 359.

Secondly, you're assuming 100 ships. Evidence of that figure would be required.
Thirdly, you assume all those ships arrived at the same time. Is it at least confirmed? It matters for two reasons:

If the UFP ships didn't arrive all at once, the Cube would have had a much easier job at blowing them up one by one.

Again, please refer to the video and what happens in it. At least 40 starships are there, a good number of which are known to have been destroyed or disabled before the E-E arrived and after.

I can read stuff, but I don't know where there is a clear count of ships.

Simple numbers and some reasonable assumptions, such as the fact that we know the Federation by this point in time was assembling large fleets of 100-326 ships or more to deal with the Dominion threat as well as the skirmishing with the Klingons. Given the high casualties seen there, the fleet would have had to have started with a fairly large size as they lost nearly a dozen ships in a mere 2 minutes of fighting. Assuming only 2 ships lost every 2 minutes, and the battle lasted at least an hour, then you have 30 starships lost. If 2 hours, then 60.

Second, other than the E-E arriving late, there is nothing to indicate piece meal arrivial of ships. I would require proof of that.

Memory Alpha suggests that 40 seconds elapsed between the beginning of the assault and the moment a distress call was sent.
What matters as much as ship numbers if not more is just how long they could fire at the Borg Cube.

The Cube would regenerate between each attack.
Fourthly, with all these factors concerned, you assume that each ship fired its entire stock of torpedoes.

More accurately, I'm actually averaging given that smaller ships likely have only between 40-100 torpedoes, while the larger ships, like a Sovereign, Akira, and Galaxy have loadouts around 250. Given the rates of fire we've discussed in other thread, 2 minutes is more than enough time for a ship to unload torpedoes with.

Yet they clearly don't fire torps at that rate of fire continuously.

It's largely unlikely, if only for the fact that it's not how we see UFP ships behave, even when they're fighting a powerful enemy they fully know they must not let pass. You see how ships behave in FC: they don't even try to fire at the same spot, and they clearly don't spam the target with everything they have.
It's also terribly unlikely because of point 1: ships don't survive long enough to fire all they have.

As per the dialog in the video clip I provided, the Admiral's ship had been destroyed, it is obvious that the chain of command had started breaking down for the fleet until the E-E arrived and Picard took command of the situation and was able to coordinate a strike on the previously unknown vunerable spot. In counterpoint, many of the ships we do see have survived since the begining of the fight and probably have fired off everything they have, or nearly so. Again, see my point on averages.

The fact that they still have anything to fire by then would actually undermine your point a lot, don't you think?

You believe I established a false dilemma by ignoring phasers. This is not correct.[
I don't mention phasers because I view them as not any better than torps, especially when their NDF effect is totally nullified by Borg defenses.
The false dilemma is also established by the show and movies: it's very rare that both
weapons get fired at the same time.

It is a False Dilemma since you have in the past blatently ignored the fact that there is a considerable DET component to phaser beams.

Considerable as "its DET part is superior to the DET of a torp"?
No, I don't think so.
And again, why insist I'm establishing a false dilemma when the show and the movies pretty prove me right about the fact that Trek is not Macross and they don't spam with all they have at once, firing all types of weapons?

We already know that a tiny rifle routinely is capable of 1.05 MW, while a narrowest of margins variance in output of the second largest phaser array on a GCS is 60 GW. The fact that we see them firing both torpedoes and phasers at the Borg cube at the end of the battle in the clip provided shows that at the least they alternated quickly between the two.

Alteranting, yes, which is not what you said first. You are, in fact, admiting that the dilemma exist, merely by the fact that they do alternate. They don't fire both simultaneously in 99.99% of the time.

Finally, you assume that a low end yield is about 44 megatons, but such is not the case at all. You can easily find one digit megaton range calcs for the torpedoes, and even from episodes such as Rise.

So what? Those are very extreme lower limits for torps for reasons we've already hashed out elsewhere that were based on fudging every possible disadvantage to weaken Trek. 44-100 megatons when all else is factored into the matter is a good average range. If you like, I can go over the numbers again, assuming 500-1,000 MT plus yield torpedoes, which are all possible given the upper range limits for torps as per a number of calcs. That would mean 50 or more teratons.

What, you don't like being reminded that your low end is not the true low end, so you do the equivalent of menacing someone with a bigger club? :)
And what's that miraculous x100,000 factor you used there? Why should I even begin to accept the idea that that many torps were fired in total? It's totally absurd.
Really, it is a decent low end, which is nothing about cheating on every possible point of importance, but simply the result of a variation in pixel measurement.
And I have nothing to do with those who ignore Kim's statement.

[KirkSkyWalker]

First, we know that the Borg had already adapted to the UFP tech in and out to know how to defend themselves against photon torps and phasers. We know that under such conditions, a Cube easily swathes UFP ships like flies. Especially since the UFP fields many decade old ships, such as Miranda-class ones. Refit or not, they're not going to be as good as ships built from scratch to accomodate the newer breakthroughs in technology.

All right, the first part has little to no bearing on the situation, other than reinforcing that the Borg cube will be very tough to defeat and making the state of the heavily damaged outer hull and fluctuating power by that point in the fight rather impressive. It shows that at least Starfleet is making progress in learning how to fight the Borg and it shows that had Picard not been assimilated in BoBW, the 40 ship fleet amassed at Wolf 359 likely would have been far more effective without the Borg possessing his knowledge.

They were making good progress with the Defiant-class warship, however Sisko said that these were discontinued "when the Borg became less of a threat."
(This claim seems odd, however, given the problems in First Contact, as well as the notion that the Borg have a conduit which leads right to Earth in "Endgame.")

Basically we know that if you disable at least 78% of the Borg-cube systems on your first shot, then you've beaten it, since they can't regenerate if you destroy that much.
So if you had enough Defiant-class ships approaching the cube while cloaked, and they all fired on it at the same time, then the cube would be decimated before it had a chance to adapt.

(I also recall reading something that the original Doomsday Machine was suspected to be a prototype Borg-fighter, which produced its subspace-distortion field in order to disrupt their communications in order to keep them from adapting to it-- meanwhile the Borg obviously couldn't assimilate somethng made of neutronium.)

True or not, it would seem that disrupting communications would be key in fighting any Borg, in order to keep their kinfolks from getting the skinny on your mojo.