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Transcription
Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the “Judgment of Solomon”, where Solomon is labelled “stargate fandom”, and the two women are labelled “star trek fandom” and “star wars fandom”. The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
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Its canon, species 8472’s combined ship super weapon thing has been shown to blow up whole planets and continuously work against the Borg. I would consider 8472’s super weapon as a in-universe death star equivalent
8472’s entire thing was organic modulation, making it impossible to adapt to.
The death star laser is based on the resonating frequency of a crystal. So it will always be the same. Easy for the borg to adapt to.
Question is can you overpower shields in Star Trek? I would postulate a “maybe” given that the Cardassians use a giant phaser on the front of their ships to break things, and they’re noted as being technologically inferior to the federation.
You can definitely overpower shields. Shields still need energy, and there are other factors involved on calculating shield integrity. Combat in Star Trek routinely shows bridge officers announcing the current strength of the shields as a percentage that drops as it absorbs more impact.
QED, the shield has its limits, so presumably a sufficiently powerful enough weapon could overcome those limits, possibly even with a single shot.
I think the question is would a shot from the Death Star, after completely depleting the cube’s shields, hit the cube at full power? Or would the shield have “absorbed” enough of the hit that the cube might survive? Or does the shield perhaps completely nullify a single shot, even if it is depleted by doing so?
It raises the question of how the Borg shield adaptation technology works. Its always shown as previously highly effective shots suddenly having “no effect.”
The fights we see with the federation have them constantly modifying their phaser output frequencies to work around that, but even then its a losing game, as the borg adapt to their modification formula.
Even the future Janeway’s super torpedoes run into this. And they were specifically designed to work around the adaptation mechanic.
I think it blows up one cube, damages a second, then no effect from then on.
Really it’s a moot point, I think at max Star Wars had 2 Death Stars, 1 finished and 1 under construction or maybe a prototype or something.
Either way, Species 8472 had that super weapon thing, but the biggest thing is they couldn’t be assimilated, Imperial personnel and tech would have no such immunity.
So they could blow up Borg cubes all they want, but they’ll be overwhelmed eventually (Which shouldn’t be too long, while the Death Star is powerful, I’m pretty sure it takess awhile to recharge between shots) to the point where drones start getting on board and then it’s game over.
Now who would win, an assimilated Death Star or all of Imperial forces lmfao
at max Star Wars had 2 Death Stars
3 if you count Starkiller Base.
It raises the question of how the Borg shield adaptation technology works
I would guess (though I certainly don’t have the knowledge or evidence to support this guess in a Daystrom-like environment) that it’s basically just about the range of frequencies. A normal shield is designed to protect against a wide range of frequencies because you don’t know where the attack will come from. This, I posit, has the effect of spreading the shield thin and making it easier to damage. Like trying to charge through a shield wall (as in mediaeval warriors) with a single layer where each defender is a metre apart.
The Borg’s adaptation is to spend all their energy on a very narrow frequency range, making it much, much stronger and more difficult to damage. Like if they shield wall were three rows deep and the fighters are standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the point you’re trying to charge through (but there are fewer-to-no enemies at other locations).
The cube doesn’t have to be able to take the hit, it just has to not be on that side of the Death Star.
Yeah, I think this is the best point. Borg cubes are pretty maneuverable compared to the death stars. Their main target is planets, which move very predictably. And they lost the first death star because it had to wait until orbit brought its target into view.
Also the Borg have transporters with which they can board anywhere at will as well as remove any personnel at will. They could pop in, transport a bunch of storm troopers to their cube and pop back out, assimilate the storm troopers, then return them to the death star with their armor hiding the cybernetics and covertly take over the station. Though in not sure the Borg would use tactics like that, they did seem to prefer more direct confrontations. But even in a direct confrontations, the Borg would be able to do anything R2D2 could, and it seemed like security was bad enough that R2D2 had control of whatever he wanted. Imagine a dozen of them opening air locks, disabling hangar bay force fields, locking doors, retracting bridges, disabling tractor beams.
I think the only real wild card the Empire would have against the Borg are the Sith. Vader or Sideous might be unstoppable for the Borg. Can they modulate shields to withstand force lightening? Lightsabers? Force push? Do they have any energy attacks Vader couldn’t just manipulate with the force?
Would the Death Star weapon be described as a laser weapon? Because IIRC canonically in the Trek universe, lasers are a very weak outdated weapons technology, easily blocked with modern shielding tech.
No, because they don’t behave like lasers (like, they don’t move at the speed of light). They’re more like massive, short lived light sabers, which are plasma within a forcefield.
Star Wars does make the laser / blaster bolt distinction like Star Trek makes the laser / phaser distinction.
But it also calls it the “main Death Star laser”. Which is probably just a holdover from before a lot of that got hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars stuff. But would also require some retcon backflips to make it “not a laser”.
People use wrong terminology a lot, no reason to think people in the Star Wars galaxy are any different there.
For example, we have these powerful handheld computers we call ‘phones’ simply because they are the current generation of a technological line that began with actual phones.
So a beam weapon of any kind could very reasonably be called a laser even if it has been decades (or even longer) since the technology moved past that.
Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t realise SW made that distinction like ST does. When you say “hammered out in the old EU and carried into the new Star Wars”, is “new” referring to post-Menace, or post-Awakens? Because I don’t remember the prequels and Clone Wars incorporating a distinction between laser and blaster, but I may just be failing to remember it.
Mostly meant the current Disney canon, which IIRC is all the live action movies, and the shows/books/etc made after the Clone Wars cartoon.
I don’t think it shows up a lot, but every once in awhile one author or another will find out about it and use it as a plot point. The reference that comes to mind is one of the really old books (want to say Splinter of the Mind’s Eye?) making a distinction that the ‘ancient’ security droids they run across at one point use lasers. I think it comes up in some of the 90s games like Dark Forces too. Probably some comics. I think like “regular” guns (slugthrowers in SW) they’re mostly filed under “weird” weapons the occasional bad guy will use to try and counter lightsabers.
Don’t really know if it shows up in the Disney stuff. They’re pretty scattershot with what is/isn’t canon from the pre-Disney EU.
The Death Star’s main gun even runs on kyber crystals, making it likely an actual fork of lightsaber tech.
Just because it’s outdated doesn’t mean it can’t do damage if it’s big enough.
For example the Enterprise gets bodied by large asteroids all the time. That means a Starship can be damaged by someone throwing a rock at it- just scaled up to the extreme.
But massive brute force with an archaic weapon can still do a lot of damage… the whole question would be how much can it withstand? Before starting to fail.
The Borg cube is 3km wide, the Death Star is as big as a moon, so in the ballpark of 1000km in radius. There is just no way a Borg Cube’s technology is so advanced it can absorb energy to make up for that size difference. Unless you are a planet sized object, the death star delivers an infinite amount of energy.
Oh. This just opened up a terrifying thought. The Borg would take one look and go, “Shit, we need one of those.” And then we’ll eventually have a Borg giga-cube on our hands.
Could be from scratch, could be from amalgamating all their other cubes. Either way, terrifying.The thing is… they don’t want something that destroys on that scale. Theyre not about destruction, they’re about assimilation and absorption. Having a huge laser that destroys a planet in a single shot simply isn’t something they’d ever use.
Small moon. The first Death Star’s radius was 60 km and the second Death Star’s was 80 km.
It’s specifically the size of a small moon, remember that the Earth’s moon is actually pretty large, 5th largest in our solar system and by a pretty good margin the largest in comparison to the planet it orbits, just in our own solar system we have Deimos at only about 6KM, and in other parts of the universe I’m sure they could be even smaller, in our own solar system Jupiter pretty regularly captures small asteroids into its orbit that could be considered temporary moons.
From the various wikis and such, the death stars were about 120 (1st death star) and 160 (2nd) km in diameter, so 60 and 80 in radius, so still significantly larger than a cube, but far less so than the 1000km you’re thinking.
And size doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much power they have at their disposal or how much they can absorb/deflect. Their weapons/shields are probably based on very different technologies, it could be like comparing a Davy Crockett nuke (basically the real-life equivalent of a fallout mini nuke) to an equivalent sized bomb made of black powder, or like an inch thick plate of steel to the same sized sheet of plywood.
And the death star crew was much larger, somewhere around 2 million people plus a few hundred thousand maintenance droids. Those humans need a lot more space and creature comforts than the Borg who just need alcoves to recharge in. I’m sure that they weren’t exactly providing luxury accomodations for most of the rank-and-file grunts and contractors and such, but they certainly got more space than the Borg need, plus dining halls, kitchens, medical bays, recreation areas, meeting rooms, offices, throne rooms, detention levels, etc. a lot of things the Borg have little or no use for. The Borg may be able to dedicate more space on the cube to weapons and shields than the death star could.
Don’t forget the death star absorbing an entire star’s energy to fire
That’s not the Death Star, that’s Starkiller Base.
What’s the difference again? They’re the exact same idea, right? Shockingly bad writing for a sequel but that was basically every element of the plot as far I can tell, given that I only watched the first one and remember absolutely none of it.
Starkiller base has longer range, and can’t move?
Starkiller Base can move. It can only fire the main gun once before it needs to relocate and consume another star.
That’s a good point. Is there any precedent for opening up localized hyperspace channels to just… redirect the energy elsewhere? You wouldn’t need to absorb anything if you can point the laser somewhere where you aren’t. Perhaps to an Imperial planet for bonus points.
Failing that, the borg have a few cubes. They could dispatch them in pairs or have a standby cube within a short hop of some others. If the Death Star pops in, bring in your backup cube. The empire would maybe be able to hit one, but could they recycle the beam to hit two before being overwhelmed?
Considering that years later, Borg couldn’t handle a solar flare when Crusher piloted the Enterprise into a Star’s Corona, the answer is no.
I don’t believe any adaption the Borg have ever displayed could stand up to the energy it takes to vaporize a planet in a single shot.
They also have thousands of disposable fighters, which aren’t nearly as common in the Star Trek universe.
Everyone focuses on the giant death laser… but it’s also a massive garrison. You’d need more than a couple borg ships to overwhelm the death star (assuming a more realistic reaction than what’s shown in New Hope).
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Borg cube or Death Star?
Replicators.
Borg are almost just another form of replicators that prefer to use biological full sized hosts as their framework.
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Cubes are fast at sublight, they would have to remain in exactly the right spot for a long time for the death star to unload the main weapon, making theorising about the main weapon pretty meaningless.
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The death star does not have shielding tech. This has all kinds of vulnerabilities.
They could have all crew teleported into space before the WO could say “huh?”
They could have ranks of borg assimilating entire critical compartments.
They could be tractorbeamed into the nearest planet or star.
Hell the cube could literally just fly back and forth through the star tearing it up from the inside.
Once shields go down fights are pretty much over and this fight starts like that.
The death star does not have shielding tech. This has all kinds of vulnerabilities.
What if it were in orbit around a small forest moon?
Tractor beams have limits. You would probably need a fleet of Cubes to tractor the Death Star.
Stars have been demonstrated to be too much for a Cube’s shields, so that strategy is out. Interestingly, Federation shields consistently hold up longer in that scenario. It’s likely the Borg favor a low energy but high efficiency design that’s good at neutralizing specific energy bands or something, but can’t handle all of them at once. The Feds, on the other hand, just make super tanky shields.
But yeah, if the Death Star doesn’t manage to kill it with the main gun before it gets within transporter range, then the Cube wins. Even a single drone will compromise the station. The Empire’s best bet would be to have Vader on board and close enough to the infection to get there before a few hundred crew are assimilated.
A Star Destroyer might have better odds simply because it does have shields, but the Borg are routinely shown transporting through shields anyway, so who knows.
The Empire’s best bet would be to have Vader on board and close enough to the infection to get there before a few hundred crew are assimilated.
Or get an assimilated Vader, which would be cool to see.
I mean I think it depends on how you think the Borg would act. Cause in general the Borg’s strategy especially earlier on when they were introduced was to just brute force attempt their goal, get killed, then learn from that and try again. So there’s a good chance unless they’ve encountered something like the death star before the first cube would get destroyed cause the Borg wouldn’t know what the threat of it is.
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Borg would assimilate the Death Star on first encounter. There’d never even be a fight.
The Borg’s first move is often to just beam drones over and start trying to assimilate people and technology.
I’d love to see the Jedi response to this. Who wins, borg personal modulating shields or lightsabers and force push?
…and what happens to the force when a Jedi is assimilated? Does the borg colective suddenly find out they had a lot of high midichlorian count drones in storage?
I think you’re probably going to end up getting into a lot of the metaphysical/philosophical/quasi-magical aspects of the force with that question.
The force isn’t just about how many midichlorians you have in your blood. The midichlorians help facilitate the physical connection to the energy of the force, but one still needs to be open to it mentally and spiritually. It is almost routinely demonstrated that connecting to the force requires discipline, meditation, and “clearing the mind”.
I’d argue that because the Borg are connected to the collective, they would be incapable of forming that connection. Drones don’t really have a mind or a spirit of their own. They can’t clear their mind. Literally, they can’t stop the constant stream of information, so long as they’re connected to the collective. And that’s to say nothing of the spiritual aspect.
Really, the force connects all living things. In a way, it’s a kind of a collective of its own. I feel like the Borg would have to be disconnected from their collective to feel the connection to another, but once you disconnect a drone, it’s ceases to be Borg.
I don’t know. We’ve seen at least two Borg queens and Locutus, and they were individuals within the collective. I wonder if a Jedi or Sith could be controlled by the Borg as part of the collective, but still be able to use their powers.
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you can’t teleport through shields
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no, the real reason is scanners, trek ships would know the entire layout of the enemy including any weak points in seconds and blasting them in short order with its phasers/disruptors, meanwhile SW still aims ship guns like it’s 1940 on the USS Colorado (BB-45).
Imagine this: the death star, slowly maneuvering around to get a firing angle on the strange “federation”(some strange new rebel group that the empire has been encountering lately) outpost situated on some moon, when suddenly a cruiser sized ship drops out of hyperspace way closer than the mass of the death star should have allowed, yet still outside the death starts turret range (how could they know?), when suddenly it shoots a “particle lance” that is able to dig a hole into your entire 3km thick armor in minutes (while 3km of steel is nice and all, a phaser can dig through a 15km asteroid in like 30seconds) and then drops what you can only guess as some sort of space torpedo into the hole, that then blows up inside the death star with an explosive yield that would wipe out an entire city in seconds, most likely directly on top of the reactor core, giving us a big boom.
The transporters thing always infuriated me, even as a kid. You can’t beam through shields, right? So, in Star Trek battles when the enemy’s shields go down it’s always, “Let’s teleport our guys in and have a pitched hallway battle with pew-pew guns, damaging random stuff and losing many of our own dudes,” and not, “Start transporting the enemy’s pilots and gunners into space, so we can just park someone in the driver’s seat afterwards and fly away with their ship.”
The main problem you’ll encounter in a Star Trek vs. Whoever matchup is not the technology and power levels between the combatants, it’s that everyone from the Star Trek universe is fucking stupid, both our Federation people and all the various chaotic evil bad guy alien races. Even the Borg.
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Without technology prepared to counter teleporters
like the shields all the ships in starwars have?
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but if “technobabble” is the reason the shields don’t apply for teleporters, we can just have technobabble for why star trek shields don’t work against the death star’s lasers
TNG Borg, or Voyager Borg? Cause it makes a difference. The Voyager Borg were weak AF.
Wasn’t Voyager significantly more powerful than any of the TNG enterprises?
But not more powerful than the fleet of ships that could barely slow a cube down in First Contact.
More powerful? Yes, but it shouldn’t have been that much stronger.
Looking into it, I was mistaken. Voyager has some more advanced tech and is more maneuverable, but Enterprise-E is the more powerful ship overall. And iirc, it does perform very well in encounters with the Borg and the times when they struggled were with Enterprise-D, which is armed similarly to Voyager until Voyager starts making weapons upgrades.
The baby is firefly fandom
I was thinking Battlestar Galactica, but that works too.
Of course we all know Borg cube or death star, sg1 will find some half assed blow shit stuff up way to destroy both of them. Like idk blowing up a star.
Real question, Atlantis vs Borg cube or death star…(Assuming they had full zpms)
Clearly the proper solution is to cut the baby in half.
I never heard this one, it’s pretty good.
Look at what you’ve done.
This question also popped up in a Stargate forum for me, and the answer was surprisingly similar, but with a different count on the number of useful laser shots. You get enough uses for two engagements. Three if you’re fast enough.
First is an insta-kill, but the FTL comms squawk tips your hand, and the countdown starts. The second is less instant, and provides accurate adaptation data. The third is a gamble, requiring you to skip refuel/repairs and jump straight to a third Borg fleet.
The bigger question is: do we assume that the giga-weapon adaptation requires a massive infrastructure overhaul for balance, or hand-wave it to their existing tech? Personally, I believe the requirements for deflecting such a beam would require taking hull space from older, unused adaptations, and in the process of archiving them, reopen those old vulnerabilities.
