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Ok, help me out here. The Borg that make an apperance in Enterprise are supposed to be survivors from the destroyed Sphere in First Contact, right? So, that being the case, how come they are vulnerable to the "phase" weapons tech of the era? If they had adapted to phaser tech, over two hundred years more advanced, why would these weapons SEEM to be me effective? On the same token, just increasing the power of the phase pistols was enough to overcome the Borg? If that worked, why not keep kicking up the settings on a type 2 phaser? If you started at say setting 5, that would give you 11 shots before you couldn't juice it up anymore.

Anybody able to explain this to me reasonably?

Perhaps phase pistols, being primitive versions of phasers, were too different for the Borg to be pre-adapted to them.
*shrug* Best I can come up with.

The writers of that episode were morons.

Sorry to steal your usual line, Rochey, but seeing how you didn't use it...

It was this episode that first sparked my theory that phase pistols ARE NOT ancestors of the Phaser. If it was a different technology that produced similar effects I guess I could buy why they worked after phasers got adapted to. Again, that could explain the phase pistol to laser to phaser paradox

The Borg don't adapt to "phasers" as such. They rather seem to adapt to specific frequencies and/or modulations of phaser beams. There always seems to be a way to retune the phaser to get through.

So my presumption is that phase pistols, being a couple of hundred years less advanced, were operating on some other frequency and modulation which the later weapons hadn't used.

I agree with GK. I imagine that the Borg would have adapted to them, given enough time and/or a communicative link with the collective.

I honestly don't remember the episode well enough; after the Ferengi episode, I thought " At least there's no way they could do a Borg episode, and screw that up."

And, then, sure enough...

I find it amusing that the phase pistols did more damage to the Borg than they did to normal people and the Borg are covered in plates of metal.

Those Borg clearly have no idea how to armour people. Just pick up some packing crates.

Mark wrote:Ok, help me out here. The Borg that make an apperance in Enterprise are supposed to be survivors from the destroyed Sphere in First Contact, right? So, that being the case, how come they are vulnerable to the "phase" weapons tech of the era? If they had adapted to phaser tech, over two hundred years more advanced, why would these weapons SEEM to be me effective? On the same token, just increasing the power of the phase pistols was enough to overcome the Borg? If that worked, why not keep kicking up the settings on a type 2 phaser? If you started at say setting 5, that would give you 11 shots before you couldn't juice it up anymore.

Anybody able to explain this to me reasonably?

Well the answer to the power issue is fairly simple. A drones shield can protect against more power than a phaser can put out.

Ugh...I feel unclean now.

Cpl Kendall wrote:

Mark wrote:Ok, help me out here. The Borg that make an apperance in Enterprise are supposed to be survivors from the destroyed Sphere in First Contact, right? So, that being the case, how come they are vulnerable to the "phase" weapons tech of the era? If they had adapted to phaser tech, over two hundred years more advanced, why would these weapons SEEM to be me effective? On the same token, just increasing the power of the phase pistols was enough to overcome the Borg? If that worked, why not keep kicking up the settings on a type 2 phaser? If you started at say setting 5, that would give you 11 shots before you couldn't juice it up anymore.

Anybody able to explain this to me reasonably?

Well the answer to the power issue is fairly simple. A drones shield can protect against more power than a phaser can put out.

Ugh...I feel unclean now.

So, how did increasing the yield of the phase pistol overcome the Borgs adaptive shielding?

Just because it can absorb damage better doesnt make it impervious to it. You could just over power it eventually.

Mark wrote:
So, how did increasing the yield of the phase pistol overcome the Borgs adaptive shielding?

The phase pistols are probably more powerful than the TNG counterparts on whatever setting they were using. Phasers seem to use some sort of *technobabble* chain reaction, it's not a stretch that an older model would use more bute force.

Maybe the phase pistol's modulation became more unstable when pushed past it's normal limits.

Or, was just more unstable naturally, being more primitive technology. It would introduce the "randomness" which seemed to work against the Borg when artificially introduced to phasers.