I suppose this sort of thing is dealt with on various specialist boards ad nauseum, but I haven’t seen it here.
Scenario 1: the largest Borg cube shows up near the death star. Their transport mechanism doesn’t work, so they start to attack it. The death star mobilizes its force of tie fighters, and prepares to use its planet destroying death ray (or whatever they call it) on the Borg cube, but it takes 10 minutes to get it going. Meanwhile the Borg are attacking with their best weapons (phasers, photon torpedoes, whatever they have). Who wins?
Scenario 2: as above, except the Borg transport mechanism does work, and the Borg transport half their force onto the death star to try to assimilate the death star crew. They pop up all over the death star, in residential quarters and engineering and everywhere. Do they have any chance to succeed or are they mown down by storm troopers (or the cube destroyed by tie fighters or death ray) before they can take more than a few of the crew back to the Borg cube?
If the Borg don’t win in either of these scenarios, what if multiple cubes show up, would that change the balance?
Would the Force help Darth Vader personally resist being assimilated?
Which ships can travel faster, a Borg cube with warp drive, or an empire battleship?
My googling suggests that a “classic” Borg cube is 3 kilometers on a side; that makes it bigger than a classic Star Destroyer (which is about 1.6 kilometers long), but far, far tinier than the original Death Star, which was 160 kilometers in diameter.
In scenario 1, I’d suspect that the Borg cube’s weapons could do some damage to the Death Star, but not at such a rate that they would have much of a chance of disabling the Death Star before the Imperials were able to get the prime weapon powered up. And, throughout those 10 minutes, the Death Star’s traditional defenses (which, according to Wookieepedia, included thousands of turbolaser batteries, as well as 7200 TIE fighters) would be pounding away at the cube.
Scenario 2 is far more likely. The Borg materialize en masse on the Death Star and begin assimilating its crew. The stormtroopers manage to shoot down the first dozen or so, but the Borg quickly adapt and render their weapons ineffective — including Vader’s lightsaber, which washes over the Borg drones like a flashlight beam. Soon the Borg have assimilated a critical mass of the Death Star’s crew and effectively taken it over; even if the Death Star is able to turn its cannon onto the Borg cube and destroy it, they’re eventually overwhelmed, and the Death Star is Borgified.
Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Vader hops into his personal TIE fighter and bugs out for the nearest Imperial stronghold.
Borg, easily. They have personal shields. The only person who could resist would be Vader. Maybe. I’d love to see him open a can of force-assisted whoop ass on the Borg, though. That would be something to see. But he’s only one person.
The Borg complete their assimilation of the Death Star by lunchtime, unless the DS can get a shot off at the cube.
How efficient are the Borg at turning humans? And how many Borg are riding on one transport ship? If the Death Star is that much larger I would assume they have tens of thousands of people on board that ship…some of which clearly can shoot SOMETHING. Would the Borg just eventually all be killed off?
The Borg can assimilate a human by injecting them with nanoprobes; even if the target is not fully Borgified, he’s under the sway of the collective and out of the fight. The Borg then have access to that individual’s technical skills and knowledge; within minutes, they would know everything there is about the Death Star’s internal defenses, their strategies for repelling invaders, etc. It would be over in a matter of hours.
It’s really hard to square that with the 20 or so we see during the trench run. Union trouble? Stock take? Team-building exercise? Public holiday? Gromit shortage?
No one really can say how fast either side is. Han says he can “make point five past light speed”. “Point five” what? 1.5c? That’s Warp 1.5. Starships idle faster than that.
But obviously, in the SW universe, people get across their entire galaxy in reasonable travel times. So my theory - space is smaller there. A galaxy is about 2 billion miles across. And the people are about a half an inch tall. That explains why everything is so seemingly huge there and yet doesn’t fall apart under its own weight. And how you can have giant space slugs.
Now OTOH, that would be something. A Borg cube against that giant space worm in Solo. I don’t think they can assimilate that. Hard to fight back against being eaten.
It’s not a question of efficiency, certainly it would take quite a bit of time to overwhelm a station as large as the Death Star. But Stormtroopers would have no effective weapons against the Borg after the first couple minutes. The Borg would slowly but inexorably take over the Death Star floor by floor, eventually the empire forces would just start evacuating en masse.
If the Borg can get into transporter range, and the transporters work, the Empire just has no plausible defense against boarders appearing out of thin air, everywhere. But keep in mind that transporters can’t work through shields, and Star Wars shields seem, for the most part, to be more effective than Star Trek shields.
Without the transporters, then: Trek weapons are never shown used at a range greater than about five ship-lengths, but the Death Star routinely deploys TIE fighters out to a range hundreds of times greater than its own size. And while it’s easy to shoot down individual TIE fighters, no Trek ship has enough guns for thousands of them.
Not sure how you conclude this — in Star Wars, it’s mentioned that the Death Star has shields but the X-wings fly right through them. Besides that, it’s established that the Borg have weapons specifically designed to drain defensive shields.
The only way the Death Star beats the Borg is if they manage to destroy the Cube with its main cannon before the Borg can send over a force sufficient to assimilate the station. In “Q Who?”, the Borg beam over a single scout to assess the ship’s potential for assimilation. The Enterprise crew kill the drone (though are powerless to hurt its replacement) but, being reasonable, peace-loving people, don’t then try to attack the Cube. The Empire would have no such compunctions. It’s possible that the first few Borg scouts could be killed and the Cube destroyed before the Borg could adapt and/or send over more drones. Thus the Death Star lives to fight another day.
I’m not sure it is a case of the famous Borg “Adapting” skills. I don’t think there is any level of adaptation that can beat the Super Laser. The second cube will go up just as quickly. It’s an entirely different kind of weapon, altogether. I think it would cut through anything in either universe, save for the hull of the Planet Killer. Space amoebas, Vger, whale probes - fuggeddabouddit. Nothing left but expanding plasma.
Now if someone would transport a Genesis Device inside a Borg cube…
