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So I had an idea that came to me from watching the TNG episode, "I, Borg," and it got me thinking as to the sheer size of the scout vessel. Seeing as how the vessel only had 5 individuals as per dialogue in the episode, can we safely assume that the scout was no more than say .... 25 meters across?

And if so, I wonder how many decks the ship would have? Maybe 5 decks altogether?

Not even close.

That thing is no more than 3-4m on a side.

Yeah, it's a pretty tiny thing. Almost like a shuttle analog?

There is this, from later in the episode :

RIKER: We've picked up a vessel on the long range scanners, headed this way.
PICARD: Analysis.
DATA: The vessel is traveling at warp seven point six. Mass two point five million metric tons. Configuration, cubical.
RIKER: The Borg.
DATA: Its dimensions indicate that it is a scout ship similar to the one that crashed. Interference from the star's radiation will shield us from their sensors. We should remain undetected until they enter the system.

So this indicates that the crashed scout massed 2.5 million tons. To me that says that either Borg cubes are tremendously dense, or the wreckage we saw was a pretty small portion of the whole ship. If it was a cube say 20 feet on a side, it would have a density well over a thousand times greater than solid steel! Whereas if it has a density comparable to a modern day ship, it would be a cube something like 650 feet on a side.

So it seems very likely that the ship was actually rather large, and what we saw was a small portion of it.

Where did the five person figure come from?

From the episode:

[Crash site]

WORF: Four more. None survived.

Later:

LAFORGE: There were five on your ship.

Graham Kennedy wrote:There is this, from later in the episode :

RIKER: We've picked up a vessel on the long range scanners, headed this way.
PICARD: Analysis.
DATA: The vessel is traveling at warp seven point six. Mass two point five million metric tons. Configuration, cubical.
RIKER: The Borg.
DATA: Its dimensions indicate that it is a scout ship similar to the one that crashed. Interference from the star's radiation will shield us from their sensors. We should remain undetected until they enter the system.

So this indicates that the crashed scout massed 2.5 million tons. To me that says that either Borg cubes are tremendously dense, or the wreckage we saw was a pretty small portion of the whole ship. If it was a cube say 20 feet on a side, it would have a density well over a thousand times greater than solid steel! Whereas if it has a density comparable to a modern day ship, it would be a cube something like 650 feet on a side.

So it seems very likely that the ship was actually rather large, and what we saw was a small portion of it.

We don't just see random heaps of junk scattered around, we see a distinct cube. Yes, the density, assuming it's the same class as the one that turned up later, would be insane (somewhere between the core of the sun and a white dwarf!), but that's what we've got. The only real solution is to assume that the second scout is far bigger than the first (although obviously far smaller than a standard cube).

"Its dimensions indicate that it is a scout ship similar to the one that crashed." really rules out the idea that it was significantly different in size, don't you think?

It really has to be that we only saw a small part of the wreckage, IMO. Perhaps the scout is of modular design, and when it smashed on impact it just happened to leave a part that was cube-shaped. Although we didn't see much wreckage, that' doesn't mean much - they only showed us the immediate vicinity of the crash site, within a few tens of feet. Crashing from orbit could leave wreckage scattered over a hundred mile radius or more.

Graham Kennedy wrote:There is this, from later in the episode :

RIKER: We've picked up a vessel on the long range scanners, headed this way.
PICARD: Analysis.
DATA: The vessel is traveling at warp seven point six. Mass two point five million metric tons. Configuration, cubical.
RIKER: The Borg.
DATA: Its dimensions indicate that it is a scout ship similar to the one that crashed. Interference from the star's radiation will shield us from their sensors. We should remain undetected until they enter the system.

So this indicates that the crashed scout massed 2.5 million tons. To me that says that either Borg cubes are tremendously dense, or the wreckage we saw was a pretty small portion of the whole ship. If it was a cube say 20 feet on a side, it would have a density well over a thousand times greater than solid steel! Whereas if it has a density comparable to a modern day ship, it would be a cube something like 650 feet on a side.

So it seems very likely that the ship was actually rather large, and what we saw was a small portion of it.

I would agree, considering that I just recently watched the episode, and it got me thinking that I have not seen the Borg make ONE vessel that was small enough to resemble a shuttlecraft.