SSD versus Borg Cube

[Nonamer]

The Executor (no Darth Vader) goes against a standard Borg cube in some distant region of space. No one can flee and it's a fight to the death. Who wins?

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

Is this the first military encounter between the Borg and the Empire? The SSD basically needs to take out the the Cube in its first barrage, which I just don't see happening. Even if the SSD finds away to take out the Borg Cube the borg could transport a few drones over to SSD and assimilate it. So I guess I don't think the SSD has much of a chance even if the Borg fail to adapt to Imperial weapons.

[Nonamer]

We can have all possible scenarios:

1) First contact
2) Second contact
3) Latest in a series of fights
4) After years of war

[GStone]

It's just like the cube v DS, only easier. The cube doesn't have to worry about getting hit by anything substantial by staying behind the engines. The most that would happen is TIEs, but their weapons are puny. Beam over, isolate the engine room and spread out and you don't even need to destroy the shield globes.

Can you imagine an SSD with mass lightening equipment?

[Praeothmin]

The cube doesn't have to worry about getting hit by anything substantial by staying behind the engines.

Problem is, we've never seen the Borg use efficient tactics before.
They would simply move forward, spout the "Resistance if futile!" line, and then try to assimilate the SSD.
I think they would get demolished by the amount of fire power thrown their way (doesn't an SSD have like 250 Heavy Turbolasers in addition to all the smaller ones?).

Now, If there was a second cube that was coming in later, and had had time to analyse and assimilate the sensor data from the first cube, that one could probably survive long enough to beam many thousand drones on the SSD.
Now that could prove problematic for the poor stormtroopers.
They had trouble hitting black-clad kneeling rebel soldiers in white corridors on the Tantive IV, imagine them trying to hit walking targets... :)

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

It doesn't really matter how many drones the Borg beam over to the SSD, it just effects how long it takes them to take over the whole ship (that is once you get around five or more drones on to the ship, so they have enough expendable ones to adapt).

And Praeothmin, I don't think that there is a canon source for how many guns the SSD has, but given what we seen in the films there isn't any solid evidence that it actually has heavy guns.

There is also the possablity that the Cube would just flat out destroy the SSD, though given the Borg's tendency towards assimilation after the 3rd season of TNG it would be logical to assume that the Collective would want the SSD more or less intact.

[Mike DiCenso]

AnonymousRedShirtEnsign wrote:
It doesn't really matter how many drones the Borg beam over to the SSD, it just effects how long it takes them to take over the whole ship (that is once you get around five or more drones on to the ship, so they have enough expendable ones to adapt).

Without prior knowledge of any kind, it's unlikely that the SSD crew will learn what is going on before it is too late to act on it. At least the E-E crew had Picard's intimate knowledge of the Borg cube enviromental conditions to warn his crew in time to take serious action with.

AnonymousRedShirtEnsign wrote:
And Praeothmin, I don't think that there is a canon source for how many guns the SSD has, but given what we seen in the films there isn't any solid evidence that it actually has heavy guns.

Well, we do at least know that there are dozens, if not a few hundred anti-starfighter TL batteries scattered around the bridge tower and base superstructure area as seen in RoTJ.

I think there is a reasonable possibility of there being heavy TL batteries on an SSD given that three of the five canonical SD classes have heavy TL gun emplacements. For the sake of fairness, we can assume there are at least as many heavy TLs as on the ISD Mk. I & IIs.

AnonymousRedShirtEnsign wrote:
There is also the possablity that the Cube would just flat out destroy the SSD, though given the Borg's tendency towards assimilation after the 3rd season of TNG it would be logical to assume that the Collective would want the SSD more or less intact.

There are several possible scenarios:

a.) This is a first-contact scenario, so the Empire and Borg have little or no knowledge of each other. This leads to a "Q Who?" type situation, where the SSD, like the E-D, heavily damages the cube, but does not destroy it, and successfully repels the inital scouts. The Imperials then try and board the cube, but the cube regenerates and has time to analyse the SSD's weapons and shields, thus becoming impervious to them. If the SSD is unable to run away, it is defeated, and the Borg now know of the Empire.


b.) The SSD commander does not stop firing until very last bit of the cube is destroyed (unlikely given he has no prior experiance to draw apon). The cube is essentially defeated, but drones may be beamed into the SSD, assuming a weakness in the shields that can be exploited. In which case the Borg begin taking over the SSD slowly. The crew either abandon ship in escape pods, die, or are assimulated. Ultimate victory goes to the Borg. There is no reason whatsoever to think that blasters and other Imperial energy weapons cannot be adapted to by the Borg. Nor is there any reason to think that Borg nanoprobe tubules will not be able to penetrate Stormtrooper armor (especially since it is canon that Ewok arrows can punch through it). So close quarter hand-to-hand combat with the drones will likely just result in more fodder for the Borg to turn into more drones.

c.) Both groups have extensive knowledge of the other for whatever reason. Long term warring or what-have-you. A pitched battle with STs operating modulated and ever higher-powered blasters against constantly adapting drones. The two ships slug it out in a pitched battle. Re-modulating TLs versus adapting Borg shields. Borg tractor beam drains SSD shields eventually, and drones get beamed over by the hundreds or the thousands into critical sections of the SSD. The SSD could possibly take out the Borg cube by ramming it, should the battle go against it.

-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

"Heavy" is a very relative term, though. IMO, probably the best "mount count" is Saxton's, in which he guesses that roughly one thousand mounts can be found on the Executor. I have my doubts that these mounts all represent full scale heavy turbolaser arrays as Saxton suggests, of course; something that size in a fighter-saturated environment needs point defense much more than heavy mounts.

It is, however, an open guess as to how powerful any of these individual blisters are. Clearly the Executor outclasses other Star Wars ships; however, it also was defeated fairly handily by a small fleet of substantially smaller ships.

Before anyone pounces on that, however, the Borg actually have a similarly unimpressive record by size; although Borg cubes have wiped out fleets casually, as at Wolf 359, Borg cubes are immensely massive. When they are defeated, it is by a fraction of their displacement in smaller ships, as in ST:FC.

[l33telboi]

Hmm. It's strange to see how differently discussions like this go on different sites.

Just to see how people here would respond. What are the genral weapons fire yields you consider true in both cases? How much punishment do you think the shields could take?

There's also a long running warsie theory saying that the Borg can't adapt to TL's, since they aren't freqency based. The same is said for the drones, that they can't adapt to blasters. What do you think of this?

[Mike DiCenso]

Why would apparently plasma based TL bolts be any different than any other weapon encountered by the Borg? Why wouldn't a TL, be it a laser or a plasma weapon not have some kind of natural frequency? There's only two ways we've seen in Trek for the Borg shields to be defeated:

1.) Modulate frequency of energy weapons. Usually this buys you a few shots, so you'd better make 'em count.


2.) Overwhelm the Borg ship with an enourmous amount of energy. So far, only Species 8472 has been able to do this. Even then, over time the Borg shields showed some adaptation as the damage taken by the Borg ships went from 1-2 shots kill a Borg cube by an S8472 bioship to 1 shot does moderate damage.

The Federation fleet in ST:FC seemed to do a mix of 1 & 2. The E-D deflector weapon was also high energy output, plus high-end EM frequency. Rabid Warsies would claim that single heavy TL puts out S8472 level or higher firepower ( AoTC ICS here, people), and so the Borg wouldn't be able to adapt. However, as other discussions on the subject have shown, that kind of firepower has yet to be demonstrated by any SW starship outside of the Death Stars' superlasers.
-Mike

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

I'm not saying that there aren't HTLs on SSDs, just that we never see the Executor ever shoot at another capitol ship. It probably has at least 4x as many HTLs as an ISD mk2. And JMS, there is a big difference between the ass kickings Executor and the Borg Cube took. The Cube was attacking and alone, where as the Executor had a fleet of about 30 ISDs and the Rebels were already down two of their bigger capitol ships before engaging the fleet.

I33telboi: I think the Borg Cube out guns the SSD, but not by more than an 10x. As for adapability, the Borg have encountered around 10,000 species that they have classified (only sentient ones?) and to my knowledge the only one that they can't adapt to fight is 8472 (there are several in the delta quadrent that I have my doubts about also) so they can almost certainly adapt to turbolasers and blasters.

[l33telboi]

Why would apparently plasma based TL bolts be any different than any other weapon encountered by the Borg? Why wouldn't a TL, be it a laser or a plasma weapon not have some kind of natural frequency?

Some might say that bladed/blunt weapons and the tommy gun example show that Borg drones are vulnerable to anything but frequency based weaponry. Don't know about the Borg cubes though. And also, since it's not stated that blasters or TL's are frequency based, wouldn't burden of proof fall on the one making the suppostision that TL's and blasters are frequency based?

Unless this much referred to frequency is something that you could say actually exists normally in energy weaponry according to modern science? I'm still a bit new at this, so if the questions are on the dumb side, my apologies.

It's just a bit hard to figure out the "truth" from the various things i've seen. And i suppose the best way is just to ask, ask and ask.

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

A weapon will have a frequency if it involves a wave of some sort. Phasers are sort of like light since they have wave particle duality (though I think the phaser's partical has mass). So if the turbolaser has a wave component (like say if it were actually a LASER like many warsies claim :) then the borg could adapt to it.

[Jedi Master Spock]

At the same time, I'd point out just how much less massive the Federation ships were next to the Borg cube. The Super Star Destroyer was about ~250 times the size of an ISD - only a few dozen times the size of Home One, displacing overall on the order of ten times the entire Rebel fleet.

A 28 cubic kilometer Borg cube is ~10,000 times the size of the E-E, displacing on the order of hundreds of times the entire Federation force that brought it down in pitched battle.

With regard to adaptation: The variety of incoherent "brute force" weapons available in the Star Trek universe should put that to rest, I believe. An antimatter/matter reaction, fusion warhead, or plasma rifle is highly incoherent.

Photon torpedos initially seemed quite effective against the Borg, but this changed. If the Borg needed a coherent frequency to adapt to, photon torpedos would have remained highly effective throughout. The reason why we hear so much about frequencies of weapons is that by altering the frequency of the weapon, you change the weapon - requiring further adaptation.

[Praeothmin]

So if the turbolaser has a wave component (like say if it were actually a LASER like many warsies claim :) then the borg could adapt to it.

It doesn't really matter, IMO, what the weapon truly is. What matters is how the weapon delivers its damaging power.
If it is a DET weapon, like warsies claim, then that means that the damage comes from the Energy wave, which then brings us back to what you said:

weapon will have a frequency if it involves a wave of some sort

But, like Mike said:

Overwhelm the Borg ship with an enourmous amount of energy. So far, only Species 8472 has been able to do this. Even then, over time the Borg shields showed some adaptation as the damage taken by the Borg ships went from 1-2 shots kill a Borg cube by an S8472 bioship to 1 shot does moderate damage.

Even adapted Borg shields will still take damage from really powerful weapons.