Yup. Even without the exhaust port leading straight into the main reactor (which reactor is of some mythical reactor type that explodes like a giant bomb when disrupted), instead of sending snub fighters to engage in ineffectual strafing runs the Rebs could have sent up a couple of dozen cruise missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads (or antimatter warheads if you prefer). Sure, actually blasting a 100 km+ object to smithereens would be improbable, but you could certainly fuck it up pretty good. The main weapon dish is, what, dozens of kilometers across? And the eight points where the subsidiary beams emerge are even smaller. A few well-placed nukes should render the Death Star much less menacing.
On the other hand, as you get close in to the sphere you’re below the horizon of even much of the hemisphere facing you. Not sure about the math, but sketch yourself a circle, put a point outside the circle within say a couple of radii, draw the tangents through that point, and you’ll start to see what I mean - whereas one-sixth, minimum, of the cube can trace line-of-sight however close you are.
You have to accept that in most science fiction, the weapons are often ludicrously underpowered. A 64-megaton explosion would not only have vaporized the Borg cube, but would also have vaprized the Enterprise, judging from the fact that it’s about a kilometre away in every shot.
They also seem to have lost the ability (in most Sci-Fi movies and TV episodes) to fire weapons at targets beyond visual range, and to fire guided weapons.
Of course, the reality of antimatter weapons is that they’d make for very short battles. Half a gram of antimatter - about the weight of an Extra Strength Tylenol - will incinerate a small city. The explosion of ten pounds of antimatter, about the weight of a decently sized housecat, would make the Soviet “Tsar Bomba” look like a firecracker; it’d seriously damage the Earth’s biosphere.
[spoiler]Do I need to add a spoiler for a game cut scene? Probably.
In the game X-Wing, a nuke smuggled on board a Star Destroyer obliterates it.[/spoiler]
Star Trek weapons vary in intensity according to the plot, I remember an episode of DS9 quoted six photon (antimatter) torpedoes as the minimum to flatten what seemed to be a modestly sized city.
For a large, unmaneuverable ship like the Death Star, it’s probably safe to assume that enemy ships will attack along the path of least resistance. The ability to focus fire into certain arcs is only useful if your targets aren’t maneuverable enough to keep out of those arcs/ [EDIT: Or if you can fool your enemy into believing that your Fire Arc O’ Doom isn’t operational] This means that the “one-sixth, minimum” for a cube becomes “one-sixth, full stop”.
They do have shields, which increases their survivability a lot. And they did mention late in the scene when the Borg were chasing them that they couldn’t fire again without being destroyed themselves.
But in general I agree that sci-fi weapons in the visual media are underpowered; it’s one reason I like written sci-fi more.
For another example, we see in Shadows of the Empire why Jabba and friends were nervous of Leia’s “thermal detonator”; that “thermal” is short for “thermonuclear”.
I’m not so sure that it’s true that photon torpedoes are portrayed as less devastating than they should be. In an atmosphere, sure, the Tsar Bomba would completely obliterate something like the Enterprise, but most of the Star Trek battles are in space. If a photon torpedo penetrated into a spaceship, I would expect it to destroy it, but what if it doesn’t? You have a big nuke with little mass to form any sort of blast like you would get in an atmosphere, so in the case of antimatter you mostly you get an enormous flux of gamma rays. I’m not sure what effect that would have on a 24th-century spaceship.
Looking at proposed real-life Earth technology, you’ve got the Orion project which was supposed to propel a spaceship using nuclear bombs. It was supposed to have an ordinary metal plate (steel I think, albeit several meters thick) mounted on shock absorbers, and the plate was expected to be able so survive hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions pretty close nearby. If we can conceive of such a thing already, using ordinary materials, who’s to say the Federation couldn’t come up with some sort of effective armor?
Come to think of it, that could be a legitimate reason why they call it a photon torpedo, because its primary effect is to bombard the target with high-energy photons.
Was that you at the beginning of Robot Chicken Star Wars special II? Do you need a sock?
One advantage of cubes is that they can dock to each other easily, should one (to quote Roy Scheider) need a bigger boat. The surface of Borg cubes is shown to be able to restructure itself, repairing damage, I have no problem believing that Borg cubes can “melt” into each other, forming larger vessels as needed.
Well, they did used to bulls-eye womp-rats in their T-16s back home. They aren’t much bigger than 2 meters.
To answer the OP’s question, the sphere seems like a more elegant design for a large object in space. Presumably everything is tied into a central core, so it stands to reason that the most economical design has an outer shell about eqidistant from the core on all sides (IOW a circle).
Square, however, is better for stacking. Like if for some reason, your Borg wanted to stack a bunch of cubes together.
I thought the question was more about whether spheres or cubes are better designs for spaceships in general . . . but if we’re talking specifically about Borg vs. Death Star, I have to think one shot of the Death Star’s planet destroying laser would obliterate the Borg. They wouldn’t get a chance to adapt.
Now, if the Borg knew what they were up against in advance maybe they could find a way to avoid being shot long enough to take the Death Star out. Say they warp in to the non-laser side of the Death Star, and then while it’s rotating to take aim at them they beam over some some Borg drones to take over the Death Star’s computer systems, infect the crew with Borg nanoprobes, etc… Then they could take off at warp speed, and come back once the drones had had enough time to shut the whole thing down from the inside.
Those wouldn’t be typical Borg tactics though. Usually it seems like they take more of a brute force approach to combat, and count on their ability to adapt to your weapons and regenerate whatever damage you did in the mean time. But try that against the Death Star and you’re toast.
I feel the need to point out that the Borg used both cubes and spheres. For some reason, the cubes were generally larger. I often wondered when Voyager would run into a Borg tetrahedron, but it never happened.
And the Goa’uld used pyramids (half-octahedrons). I guess every race has their own geometrical hang-ups that space construction allows them to indulge.
ETA: Just realized that humans generally go for phallic spacecraft. Hang-ups indeed.
That’s because sci-fi ships are usually derived from their terrestrial naval or aviation counterparts where a long, slender airframe/hull is most efficient.
Actually, a long, slender frame could be most effective in space, too. It depends on your ability to turn and how precise it needs to be. It means you turn slow, but also that you turn more accurately and controllably. It you use non-magic drive systems, that might be very important.
I don’t think you would turn more slowly, though I’d have to play with the physics a bit to be completely sure. In the atmosphere, the restriction on turning from long and slender designs is because of the very high drag coefficient more than anything else (especially with aquatic vessels) – take away the atmosphere and put your turning mechanisms on the end to maximize the torque, and I think it would be the same.
