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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.
Cubes are fast at sublight, they would have to remain in exactly the right spot for a long time for the death star to unload the main weapon, making theorising about the main weapon pretty meaningless.
The death star does not have shielding tech. This has all kinds of vulnerabilities.
They could have all crew teleported into space before the WO could say “huh?”
They could have ranks of borg assimilating entire critical compartments.
They could be tractorbeamed into the nearest planet or star.
Hell the cube could literally just fly back and forth through the star tearing it up from the inside.
Once shields go down fights are pretty much over and this fight starts like that.
What if it were in orbit around a small forest moon?
I mean I think it depends on how you think the Borg would act. Cause in general the Borg’s strategy especially earlier on when they were introduced was to just brute force attempt their goal, get killed, then learn from that and try again. So there’s a good chance unless they’ve encountered something like the death star before the first cube would get destroyed cause the Borg wouldn’t know what the threat of it is.
Tractor beams have limits. You would probably need a fleet of Cubes to tractor the Death Star.
Stars have been demonstrated to be too much for a Cube’s shields, so that strategy is out. Interestingly, Federation shields consistently hold up longer in that scenario. It’s likely the Borg favor a low energy but high efficiency design that’s good at neutralizing specific energy bands or something, but can’t handle all of them at once. The Feds, on the other hand, just make super tanky shields.
But yeah, if the Death Star doesn’t manage to kill it with the main gun before it gets within transporter range, then the Cube wins. Even a single drone will compromise the station. The Empire’s best bet would be to have Vader on board and close enough to the infection to get there before a few hundred crew are assimilated.
A Star Destroyer might have better odds simply because it does have shields, but the Borg are routinely shown transporting through shields anyway, so who knows.
Or get an assimilated Vader, which would be cool to see.