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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.
Removed by mod
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
3 if you count Starkiller Base.
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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