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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.
Borg would assimilate the Death Star on first encounter. There’d never even be a fight.
The Borg’s first move is often to just beam drones over and start trying to assimilate people and technology.
I’d love to see the Jedi response to this. Who wins, borg personal modulating shields or lightsabers and force push?
…and what happens to the force when a Jedi is assimilated? Does the borg colective suddenly find out they had a lot of high midichlorian count drones in storage?
I think you’re probably going to end up getting into a lot of the metaphysical/philosophical/quasi-magical aspects of the force with that question.
The force isn’t just about how many midichlorians you have in your blood. The midichlorians help facilitate the physical connection to the energy of the force, but one still needs to be open to it mentally and spiritually. It is almost routinely demonstrated that connecting to the force requires discipline, meditation, and “clearing the mind”.
I’d argue that because the Borg are connected to the collective, they would be incapable of forming that connection. Drones don’t really have a mind or a spirit of their own. They can’t clear their mind. Literally, they can’t stop the constant stream of information, so long as they’re connected to the collective. And that’s to say nothing of the spiritual aspect.
Really, the force connects all living things. In a way, it’s a kind of a collective of its own. I feel like the Borg would have to be disconnected from their collective to feel the connection to another, but once you disconnect a drone, it’s ceases to be Borg.
I don’t know. We’ve seen at least two Borg queens and Locutus, and they were individuals within the collective. I wonder if a Jedi or Sith could be controlled by the Borg as part of the collective, but still be able to use their powers.
Ironically, I think the Force and the Borg would be an interesting Voyager episode. Do the Borg have a connection? Are they alive by spiritual standards? Do Borg have individual souls, or perhaps a collective soul? In TNG I would argue that they have one single soul, up until Locutus and the queen showing up. Then in Voyager the Borg got their own little VR mind holiday site where individuals part of the collective could keep some of their individuality.
Going by the collective argument, I’d say that the Borg would try to join the Force collective as a means to assimilate all. They would attempt to corrupt and control the Force, and probably be met with fierce resistance from the Sith.
I’m not so sure about the necessity to clear one’s mind. Some very impressive moments involving the force were the result of overemotional characters wielding the dark side, intentionally or unintentionally. I think the light side may all be about calm and control, but that’s just one aspect of the force that the Borg would not necessarily be interested in.
I think teleporters are one of the reasons a Trek vs Wars war will end up with Trek winning. Without technology prepared to counter teleporters, even a shuttle can take out a squad of fighters by teleporting out the enemy oxygen supply, or the pilots themselves into space.
Both sides have enough random “because the writers didn’t feel like coming up with an explanation” tech but teleporters are pretty OP. On the other hand, Wars has space wizards, so in a ground battle the question would be “can we get a teleporter lock before they kill too many of us”.
The transporters thing always infuriated me, even as a kid. You can’t beam through shields, right? So, in Star Trek battles when the enemy’s shields go down it’s always, “Let’s teleport our guys in and have a pitched hallway battle with pew-pew guns, damaging random stuff and losing many of our own dudes,” and not, “Start transporting the enemy’s pilots and gunners into space, so we can just park someone in the driver’s seat afterwards and fly away with their ship.”
The main problem you’ll encounter in a Star Trek vs. Whoever matchup is not the technology and power levels between the combatants, it’s that everyone from the Star Trek universe is fucking stupid, both our Federation people and all the various chaotic evil bad guy alien races. Even the Borg.
Realistically, technology is just there to support the story that’s being told in Star Trek. When writing about the implications of mind meld space AIDS, the ethical considerations of eternal punishment, or weak metaphors for racism, the writers don’t really care about what the technology can and can’t do. See the literal “techno babble here” in some of the scripts where the actors just made things up on the spot.
The people in Star Trek may be absolute idiots, but if the Empire had any staff that made it through high school they would’ve crushed the rebels so many times over. A reasonable explanation could be that, like the nazis they’re designed after, their leaders were on drugs 24/7.
In both cases, their weapons are ridiculously imprecise to make for cool action scenes. Automated aiming systems we had decades ago could easily hit enemies taking evasive manoeuvres that ships take in either franchise. The problems we have today with real life killer robots isn’t that they have storm trooper aim, but rather the ethical considerations and where to put the blame when one of the robots starts murdering children. I think either Enterprise or Voyager already did an episode on that, and in Wars combat drones are just accepted, so these flaws in technology really shouldn’t be happening.
The incompetence on display is something I really dislike especially about the recent Treks. I know people like their inter personal drama, but if you’re having an emotional little sob on the bridge of any important starship, you need to get out and be replaced until you can work through whatever you’re going through. At least in Star Wars, where the bridge is cold and rather boring unless Jedi show up, everyone is doing their jobs.
That’s also one of the reasons I’m looking forward to the show about cadets, because there the characters can have all of their interpersonal issues and such without the universe around them pretending that they’re the best of the best.
no, the real reason is scanners, trek ships would know the entire layout of the enemy including any weak points in seconds and blasting them in short order with its phasers/disruptors, meanwhile SW still aims ship guns like it’s 1940 on the USS Colorado (BB-45).
Imagine this: the death star, slowly maneuvering around to get a firing angle on the strange “federation”(some strange new rebel group that the empire has been encountering lately) outpost situated on some moon, when suddenly a cruiser sized ship drops out of hyperspace way closer than the mass of the death star should have allowed, yet still outside the death starts turret range (how could they know?), when suddenly it shoots a “particle lance” that is able to dig a hole into your entire 3km thick armor in minutes (while 3km of steel is nice and all, a phaser can dig through a 15km asteroid in like 30seconds) and then drops what you can only guess as some sort of space torpedo into the hole, that then blows up inside the death star with an explosive yield that would wipe out an entire city in seconds, most likely directly on top of the reactor core, giving us a big boom.
like the shields all the ships in starwars have?
Yes, the shields that regularly get bypassed in star trek through techno babble. Whatever star wars has is one anti chronoton polarity reversal away from being completely ignorable as long as there’s one or more aliens around that form a hyperbolic metaphor of current earth politics.
Even if the Federation teleporters are relatively weak, the Borg teleporters don’t seem to be affected by shields or any other kind of technology, unless the writers deemed it necessary.
That’s not to say Star Wars doesn’t have its weird writing, either. Every new movie or publication, the force can do new things, or things it could do before suddenly stop being possible.