Apparently in the Trek verse, plasma weapons are a slightly more primitive weapon than phasers - in Enterprise, the ships weapons were originally plasma before getting upgraded to early phasers. But they’re still in use even in the later Trek series, so they’re not that obsolete.
Oh, good question. They couldn’t assimilate Data, but they were very interested in talking him into joining voluntarily. Would they find droids similarly interesting?
And now I’m picturing the Borg Queen trying to seduce C3PO.
I don’t see it working this way. I never saw the Jedi mind trick as a permanent subjugation of an individual’s will, just a momentary befuddlement that eventually goes away. Luke could use Bib Fortuna to get into Jabba’s throne room but he didn’t have him permanently in thrall. I think Vader could probably dissuade a particular Borg from taking a particular action (presuming the drone was cut off from the collective), but the idea of that disseminating through the entire Borg consciousness wouldn’t work —as Geordi notes, the Borg have safeguards against anomalous or harmful instructions, and Vader’s commands would get buried in the noise.
Voyager Borg, yes. Seven of Nine said the Borg determined that the Kazon, primary antagonists for the first few seasons, were not worth assimilating. There were also societies that pretended to be low tech in order to avoid assimilation.
I strongly suspect the Borg would not respond to the Death Star the same way they did to the Enterprise-D. I suspect the smaller ship and estimates of their tactical abilities were involved in their decision to just send over a single drone to assimilate data. I don’t think we can count on that as being their strategy with the Death Star, which is basically an artificial planet.
My idea is that they’d actually beam into one of the lesser ships, and start from there. If the drone and the ship is destroyed, as I suspect it would be, then I would expect them to beam in and assimilate, and then say everything is fine. Then they get full info, and make a plan of attack from there. Destruction of the Death Star would be easy, given the fatal exhaust port flaw, but they probably want to assimilate the tech. So they probably go for assimilation of the people to get the new tech. And, yes, they can assimilate Droids, since they can assimilate technology. They didn’t assimilate Data because he had a code they needed but couldn’t get that would automatically destroyed the second they tried to forcibly remove it from his brain.
The only way I see them “losing” is if the Death Star self-destructs to stop them. Stopping them with a weapon that takes 10 minutes to warm up is just unlikely, and they’ll already know about it. I do not believe the whole “sleep” idea would occur to the Empire, since that took letting some android interface with a drone to find out the available commands. I don’t think a simple Jedi Mind Trick would get the same level of access, and I don’t expect them to use their own droids, as droids are not really all that highly valued, unlike Data.
So it’s either a win for the Borg, or a stalemate.
As for scenario 1: if transporters don’t work, I suspect the Borg just get out of dodge until they are in full working order, before checking in on a new threat. So there is no fight unless it becomes scenario 2. The Borg attack from a position of strength whenever possible.
Really, the only hope for beating the Borg in the Star Wars universe is if they attack the Rebels instead. Then R2-D2 just has to interface with their command structure and order them to self-destruct, since that little fucker can basically do anything.
I just got a note from “the back room;” apparently, in the Trek 'verse, you can shrug off in excess of a yottjoule by simply modulating the harmonic frequencies of the deflector shields. As long as, Mr. Riker says, it’s only pathetic, antiquated lasers. :rolleyes:
That “biological and technical disctinctiveness” was the problem, according to Seven. It was decided that assimilating the Kazon would only detract from the Borg desire for self improvement. In other words, assimilating them would only make the Borg worse.
It kinda makes sense. They were a warrior race without any of the redeeming factors of the Klingons. The only tech they had was stolen from their captors–they didn’t invent their own. They were very divided among themselves, essentially being multiple nomadic tribes, just with space ships. A single defector from Voyager was able to infiltrate them and become the effective leader of one of the tribes in a few months at most. (As a woman, she preyed on their sexism, becoming the leader’s trophy wife and then controlling him by easily outsmarting him.) She was, in fact, the only reason the Kazon ever really posed a threat to Voyager itself.
Out of universe, I think they were trying to cover a possible plot hole–that the Kazon were so close to Borg territory but were never assimilated–while also throwing in a friendly swipe at the earlier attempts to make them important and big threats.
The low tech societies exception made more sense to me. The one species I’m thinking of pretended to be at agrarian, pre-industrial levels of tech. I could see the Borg leaving them alone, waiting for them to develop tech. Of course, these people really had advanced genetic tech and created a child who had a pathogen that could take out an entire Borg ship.
Which I guess brings us back to the battle stuff. Bio-weapons were the only things that really worked against the Borg. Does Star Wars have any?
ExTank, I think that we can all agree that a hit from the Death Star’s primary weapon would destroy a Borg cube, adaptation be damned. The trick is in landing that hit: It takes a long time to warm up and is difficult to aim.
Ya know - I just watched ‘The Last Jedi’ - the Empire can’t even figure out its fighting an astral projection - it doesn’t have much hope against the Borg.
