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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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The thing about trek and wars fans is that humanity has the biggest baddest guns in their respective universe.
Gate fans know we tau’ri are inferior in technology, internal politics, weapons, manpower, and even our biology compared to the goa’uld and jaffa, the Asguard, and the replications.
We have a massive inferiority complex and we are fully aware that we are just hairless apes bumbling around in the dark, fiddling with tech that we barely, if at all understand.
Whoever said this doesn’t know either setting very well. Borg become resistant, not immune to weapons they encounter. Starships were still perfectly capable of damaging Borg ships with the same weapons years later.
The problem is that the two settings operate on entirely different scales. Individual Turbolaser bolts are something like thousands of 24th century Photon Torpedoes? Even if we assume the Cube can resist 90% of the energy from each bolt, it’s still having a very bad day.
So, here’s a thought; the Death Star’s superlaser is the only real laser weapon in Star Wars, while basically every other ranged weapon (blaster) is a plasma weapon. The main strength of the borg’s shields is that they’re able to adapt to phaser frequency, and while phasers are a completely fictional technology, they’re definitely not plasma. Do we know how well a borg cube’s shields would hold up against plasma? Is it possible that they’d go down to a barrage of Tie Fighter and Blaster Cannon fire, without the need to even use the superlaser?
Edit: OK, so I went down a rabbit hole on this, and this is what I learned about the Borg’s Adaptive Shield Matrix:
All phasers are generated on a particular subspace phase compression pulse frequency, whilst torpedo warheads all possess their own shielding which also possesses its own subspace phase compression pulse frequency. Adaptive Shielding works by remodulating the shields to the identical subspace compression pulse frequency of torpedos and phasers…
So, it seems like the Borg’s sheilds adapt to the subspace pulse frequencies of phasers and torpedos. Phasers are a type particle weapon that Gene Roddenberry made up when he realized lasers didn’t work the way he thought they did, and they don’t really have much basis in the real world like lasers or plasma weapons do.
Since the Adaptive Shield Matrix specifically works by adapting to subspace frequencies, there’s really no reason to think that their shields would have a distinct advantage over lasers or plasma bolts the way they do phasers. The fact the Picard was able to easily kill some Borg with hard-light bullets seems to back this up.
So, if the Borg shields don’t nullify the Death Star’s weapons like they do Star Trek starships, this just comes down firepower. The superlaser should be able to destroy any Borg cube multiple times, and even without the superlaser, they’re massively outgunned. This is 3000 meter ship against a 75 mile wide battle station. Even if the 10,000 turbolaser, 2,500 laser cannons, 2,500 ion cannons can’t overpower them (and by the way, it sounds like at least some of those, “lasers,” are actually plasma weapons based on wookiepedia, because of course Star Wars can’t be consistent), and the 768 tractor beam projectors can’t immobilize the cube, the 7,000 individual tie fighters would probably overwhelm the it. Hell, if the Death Star is faster, they could probably just smash into them and still survive the damage.
I think the Death Star has this by a mile. I hate to admit it, but I don’t see a win condition for the Borg here.
Could a Borg cube stop a Nemesis style Picard maneuver, if deflecting the energy at impact was the only option?
Basically, if I took a high powered super rifle and pointed it at a Borg cube, how many shots do I get? Or, is the Stargate proposition correct, projectile attacks are so primitive that the Borg simply can’t defend themselves against it?
I imagine a laser weapon, any directed energy weapon for that matter, would be a short lived attack method against the Borg. The first shot, sure, it works. Maybe the second if it comes fast enough. But a hive mind super computer is going to adapt eventually and the Borg adapt quickly.
I don’t know, Borg shields seem highly selective in how they work. The ships shields seem like they function like every other starship shields, which would mean deflecting solid objects/phaser fire. The only difference is that they adapt to phaser frequencies, but that’s not entirely helpful since phasers are distinct from lasers and exclusive to Star Trek.
But the Borg also have personal sheilds that seem to only deflect phasers, since the crew are able to physically touch the borg when they’re shielded like this. Does this mean that the Borg’s ships shields actually can’t deflect physical objects?
Here’s another one; the personal borg shields can’t seem to stop Picard’s holodeck bullets in First Contact. Does that mean they can’t stop any physical objects, or does it mean they can’t stop hard light constructs? If they can’t stop hard light, can they even stop true laser fire?
The Borg shield COULDN’T stop hard light bullets, but the whole gimmick of the Borg is that they adapt to any weapon used against them, that holographic bullets wouldn’t work next time.
So, I don’t think that’s true. We’ve only ever seen them adapt their shields and weapons to phaser frequencies, and the rotating-frequency strategy was pretty effective throughout TNG and First Contact. It seems more like that adapting to phaser frequencies just piece of technology that assimilated rather than an having an innate ability to adapt to any attack.
I think, while the death star could probably take out a borg cube, as mentioned by others with the size discrepancy alone, I think it becomes a potentially harder calculus if you field even two, potentially more, borg cubes. At that point, it sort of falls down to how the borg shields hold up against blasters and ion cannons, and that seems like kind of a shitfuck. There’s not a real answer to it, because both of them are either totally fictional or theoretical technologies. That maybe also holds true for things like the death star’s laser, but as others have said, there’s better analogues for that which we see the borg go up against and lose.
I think there’s also potentially an interesting difference here in how the Borg’s warp drive works vs Star wars hyperdrives. Could the Borg cube just jump right up to the death star and then board immediately? Could they bypass the laser by just warping in? I dunno, also a consideration, also unanswerable.
Would the death star be hackable? I dunno, the star wars computers might be too different, or even just too fucking old. They seem more fucked up than the star trek computers, anyways.
I dunno. They probably both get wiped by the halo ring, in any case.
What would the Borg do if Vader boarded their cube and went all Vader on them?
I lean more towards being a fan of Star Trek than Star Wars, but Vader is pretty powerful.
Vader at the peak of his power is pretty crazy. IMO it’d take a lot of drones to overwhelm him in a direct confrontation, but a cube has drones in the tens of thousands, so that’s at least in the realm of plausbility.
Most interesting cross-universe interaction is if the Force can be used to resist transporters, because spacing Vader is probably the best way to get rid of the threat. I think that’s a moot point though since the borg can (and do) blow up their own ships to eliminate even minor threats (see: the Borg Queen blowing up a cube of 64k drones for a couple deviants in Unimatrix Zero). So, their best chance is to transwarp to the middle of nowhere and self destruct the cube he’s on. If the ship’s detonation doesn’t take him out, just count on the cold equations of space to do the rest.
Conclusion: Darth Vader would pose a grave threat to any Borg facility he should choose to board, but the Collective is resilient enough to not really care about any damage he could do.
is if the Force can be used to resist transporters
The trained and genetically manipulated soldier in s03e11 of TNG “The Hunted”, could resist the teleporters to some extent, iirc. Or at least someone has resisted transporters at will. So I think Vader could too.
Why is everyone assuming that the death star would use it’s superlaser (apparently that’s what it’s called) against the borg cube? The superlaser has a very low fire rate and I doubt it’s good in combat against any small moving target, and to the death star that’s what a borg cube is. The general armament of a death star seems completely useless against a borg cube because it would adapt to the regular turbo lasers almost immediately.
The first death star has a very low fire rate. Like hours if not a day between shots. The Death Star 2 had a fire rate of minutes. I would assume they are fielding the DS2.
Also we see the DS2 handling small quick moving capital ships in RotJ
People always debate Wars vs Trek but forget Blazers. Death Star absolutely loses to Wave Motion Gun
I didn’t forget Blazers, I’ve never heard of it before. And to be honest, my Googling was less-than-stellar just now, too. Is it an anime?
They had to go to the Stargate people to figure that out? I would have answered that immediately.
The first Borg cube was easily attacked and damaged by a much less powerful starship and the Borg themselves were initially overcome by Federation weapons.
But not for long.
Of course the Death Star would win against a Borg cube and of course it would only happen once.
Also, I don’t know if there are anything near 1:1 power matches in Star Wars vs. Star Trek.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily an “of course”. I can see the argument being made that the Death Star’s main laser is too powerful in sheer raw energy to be possible to adapt to. Or, going the other way, that its charge time and manoeuvrability is far too low to ever even get a single hit on a Borg cube.
I just saw this in another thread so I’ll post it again.
Despite stars being everywhere, the Borg couldn’t adapt to the energy output of a solar flare. Crusher piloted the Enterprise into a Star’s Corona in Decent pt 2 and the Borg couldn’t adapt.
So I don’t believe the Borg could ever adapt to the energy output required to vaporize a planet in a single shot. Not even a solar flare could do what the Death Star did. A planet in a solar flare would be a fast roast instead of the instant vaporization that the Death Star is capable of.
That said, even though they never show it, they could cloak and attack given they have assimilated cultures with cloaking.
That wasn’t a normal Borg ship, though. They were cut off from the collective, and that has an effect on their ability to adapt.
In any case, the Borg don’t have to adapt to the Death Star by tanking the shot outright. They can adapt by letting the shot overpenetrate, thus having most of the energy dissapate into space. They are now a Borg Cube with a big hole in the side, but the Borg don’t give a shit about that. While the Death Star is recharging, they start beaming drones on board, and unless the commander hits the self destruct button before it’s disabled, the Borg will have themselves a Death Star.
They are now a Borg Cube with a big hole in the side,
Given the diameter of the death star is 480x bigger than the side of a Borg cube, the Death Star’s ray diameter is much larger than the entire Cube.
Or to put it into perspective, if you watched Star Wars on DVD and you were at the scene where the Death Star fills the screen, a Borg Cube would be 1 pixel in size. (DVD is 480 pixels tall).
A Mon Cal cruiser is 1200m long. A Borg Cube is 3000m to each side. The beam from DS2 didn’t fully engolf a Mon Cal.
Googling says that it was capable of different power levels. But if the super laser just punched a hole in something, then Alderan wouldn’t have blown up. It would just have had a tiny hole punched in it too.
It blew up because it’s a plot point not because George Lucas was running simulations on a super computer in the 80s to calculate a planetary explosion.
Doesn’t the death star have no shield? It has been years since I watched the movie, but I remember the shield coming from a generator on the planet. So, just move the fight somewhere away from the planet and light them up.
Doesn’t the death star have no shield?.. I remember the shield coming from a generator on the planet
That’s true of the second Death Star. I forget whether there was any shield on the first DS or not, or whether there may have ended up being a shield over the second DS if it had been completed.
That was the second death star that was still under construction. When fully built they were shielded.
Thanks! How was Luke able to fly along the original death star and launch a torpedo into its exhaust port if it was shielded?
The shielding in star wars is “Ray shielding” I reckon it doesn’t stop ships.
There is a moment in the first movie where they buffet going through the shield of I recall.
That is the problem when talking different sci-fi worlds. It’s all made uo and specific to the rules of that world.
But each cube is it’s own collective, they wouldn’t share the knowledge of the weapons to another queen.
