How to fight the Borg

[Graham Kennedy]

Here's my opinion on how you fight the Borg.

We know how the Borg operate; use a weapon against them and within a short time they adapt, after which the weapon is useless. You can buy more time by retuning your weapons to different frequencies, modulations, or "nutations" (whatever that may be), but in the end this buys more time without changing the game.

So what we need to do is this : we need to build ships which mount as many different kinds of weapons as possible. They must also be able to take the maximum possible advantage of each kind for the short time it is useful.

Current Starfleet designs are lacking in this respect. Most ships are equipped with two or three weapons - phaser, photon torpedoes and possibly quantum torpedoes. They have many relatively small versions of each - a dozen or more phaser arrays, half a dozen torpedo tubes, etc. Great against the Romulans, useless against the Borg.

I propose a large ship, at least the size of the Galaxy class. It should be fitted with a single, very large, very powerful phaser cannon - think about the cannon used on the future version of the E-D in All Good Things.

Then beside this should be an equally large and powerful disrupter cannon.

Then beside this should be a plasma cannon, along the lines of that employed by Romulan Warbirds in the TOS era, suitably modernised and scaled up.

Next comes a soliton wave cannon; essentially a weaponised version of the "leave your warp engine at home" idea, this seemed to be eminently suitable for military aplications.

All four energy cannon should be of the largest size which can by physically accommodated and as powerful as the design limitations of the vessels allow for. All should also be designed to be as flexible as possible, retuning frequencies and such to the greatest extent which the designers can manage.

The ship should carry either multiple launchers for different torpedoes, or if possible a common launcher firing different sorts of weapon. Every possible weapon should be issued; photon torpedoes, quantum torpedoes, isolytic subspace charges (yes, they are unpredictable, but the effects happen to the target not me and the variation seems to go from "bad" to "worse" so I don't care), gravitic charges, tricobalt devices; even old fashioned nuclear devices may be useful in this respect.

Next, these ships should be designed to fight together, as a unit. Previous battles show Starfleet ships essentially "pecking" at the Borg a few at a time. This is a very bad tactic; remember that each time a phaser is fired at a cube, it is another chance for the Borg to simply adapt to it, and then the entire remainder of the fleet cannot use that weapon on that setting again.

The new ships should be designed to share not only sensor and targeting information with one another but also the exact status and configuration of their weapons. When the lead ship chooses a frequency pattern for it's phaser cannon, every single ship in the fleet should be able to instantly set to that pattern, and then every single ship in the fleet should be able to fire on the Borg ship with that pattern simultaneously. The result should be that each shot carries the firepower of an entire fleet rather than a single phaser array. With the aforementioned "one big gun" philosophy as well, the result should be that the damage inflicted per volley is hundreds if not thousands of times greater. And as soon as the Borg adapt to the frequency, the whole fleet changes to a new frequency en masse... once that particular weapon is useless, the entire fleet switches to a whole other type of weapon, and so on.

Of course, if the Borg have sufficient numbers then eventually they will have adapted to everything, and will still win. But I believe that the adoption of the above strategy would allow Starfleet to become a vastly more effective Borg fighting machine. Given a fleet of such ships, I would think a single Borg cube would be an easy target; even a couple of dozen cubes might be a manageable number.

Thoughts?

[Lighthawk]

The biggest problem you'd have with that kind of ship is simply in getting it designed, approved, and built in sufficient numbers. SF loves their jack of all trade ships. Just look at the trouble they had getting the Defiant built, and that thing was much smaller, less resource and engineering intensive than what you are suggesting.

As for the ship itself, I agree with the principle idea behind it, as much variety as possible. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to mount several phaser lance sized weapons on it, even as Galaxy class size, but if it can be done great. I do wonder just how available some of the alternative weapon designs would be though, phasers are SF weapon of choice. Disruptors are used by enough other races that the designs could be gotten fairly easily, though scaling it up would be a bitch for SF unless they brought in outside engineers. The less common weapons though, that could be a stumbling block.

As for all ships being linked and sharing data, firing solutions and timing and all that, they already should have been working like that honestly.

[Mark]

I honestly think your on to something, GK. But I'd run it a step further. As Starfleet goes along, they meet many different cultures with their own take on these weapons. I'd begin amassing a collection of these for use as well.

[kostmayer]

This is another reason Starfleet should increase the modular aspects of their ships. Nebula Class ships have exchangable weapons PODs, and can could swap Saucer sections pretty easily if the ships were designed properly. No need to have the ships flying round all the time with huge weapons on them, just keep a few cannon equipped saucers sections at Starbases ready to be fitted to the nearest ship when an invasion occurs.

Given how quickly the Borg can adapt and self repair, hitting them hard and fast would seem to be the only way to go.

Could you plonk a minature warpdrive on a Phaserlance, similiar to the kind Photon Torpedoes use, and create a self propelled weapon, good for say 3 or 4 shots?

[Deepcrush]

I love the phaser lance, I'm using something similar in the Trek sim on my ships and its EPIC! Absolute ripping power against ships.

[Mikey]

Without reopening the old debate, it still stands that KE weapons are effective to an extent against the Borg. Surely 24th-c. Starfleet tech could come up with a mass driver of epic proportions?

[Deepcrush]

Without reopening the old debate, it still stands that KE weapons are effective to an extent against the Borg. Surely 24th-c. Starfleet tech could come up with a mass driver of epic proportions?

Agreed.

[Vic]

A ten ton slug of the densest material you know of flying at very close to c would indeed be devastating.

[Graham Kennedy]

Whilst I don't subscribe to the idea that KE is some black magic ultimate Borg killer, there's absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be as good as any other weapon used in this context. We saw in a TNG ep - the one with the shape shifting girl Wesley fell for - that even a small handheld magnet was strong enough to rip all the iron out of a person's cells if mishandled, so they can probably make a pretty fearsome magnetic accelerator type weapons.

[Captain Seafort]

Without reopening the old debate, it still stands that KE weapons are effective to an extent against the Borg. Surely 24th-c. Starfleet tech could come up with a mass driver of epic proportions?

KE is pretty effective against most ships - look at how effective ramming tactics were against the Klingons in TotP, or the Scimitar in Nemesis. Those impacts were pretty low-energy compared with the hundreds of kilotons a PT would deliver. The only Borg shields that are specifically vulnerable to KE attacks are their drones - the ships clearly have KE shields, as they demonstrated in BoBW I.

[kostmayer]

I never could figure out how ramming was such an effiecient technique, especially against an opponent with full shields up. I kind of assumed the ramming ship would just bounce off the shields.

[Captain Seafort]

I kind of assumed the ramming ship would just bounce off the shields.

With a small enough ship they do - that was one of the tricks Roga Danar used in "The Hunted". It's bigger ships that are the problem - conservation of momentum means that any impact on the shield will be transferred to whatever's producing it, so a hard enough impact will either a) break them or b) rip them loose.

[Coalition]

A ten ton slug of the densest material you know of flying at very close to c would indeed be devastating.

The fun part comes when you try to generate, store, and release the needed to achieve that. Even more fun, at high fractions of c, you get into relativistic effects on the mass of the slug, making the energy needed much higher.


For engaging the Borg, based on First Contact, regular weapons work fine, you just need to use more of them. Enterprise alone lost in BobW, the fleet lost later on, but in First Contact they were damaging the Borg Cube (from the damage report Picard heard and took advantage of).

So the Federation would use its existing ships, it would just need a program to build more, with more weapons each. Both ammo storage, and more launchers/emitters, to shoot as much as possible so the Borg ship goes from 3 km in width, to 300+ km in width, and in very small pieces.

[SolkaTruesilver]

For engaging the Borg, based on First Contact, regular weapons work fine, you just need to use more of them. Enterprise alone lost in BobW, the fleet lost later on, but in First Contact they were damaging the Borg Cube (from the damage report Picard heard and took advantage of).

A pity we never learned how many ships engaged the Borg ship in First Contact.

[BigJKU316]

A ten ton slug of the densest material you know of flying at very close to c would indeed be devastating.

The fun part comes when you try to generate, store, and release the needed to achieve that. Even more fun, at high fractions of c, you get into relativistic effects on the mass of the slug, making the energy needed much higher.


For engaging the Borg, based on First Contact, regular weapons work fine, you just need to use more of them. Enterprise alone lost in BobW, the fleet lost later on, but in First Contact they were damaging the Borg Cube (from the damage report Picard heard and took advantage of).

So the Federation would use its existing ships, it would just need a program to build more, with more weapons each. Both ammo storage, and more launchers/emitters, to shoot as much as possible so the Borg ship goes from 3 km in width, to 300+ km in width, and in very small pieces.

I generally agree with this. However they "adapt" the laws of physics would tell me that if you are hit with a certain amount of energy it has some impact on you and I think thats what we saw in FC. Early on the energy advantage was so huge in favor of the Borg that once they adapted shielding they were invincible. But by the time of FC that appeared to be closing up.

I might toss in the odd weapon I could find now and again but the overall theme should be more weapons and more power.