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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.
They had to go to the Stargate people to figure that out? I would have answered that immediately.
The first Borg cube was easily attacked and damaged by a much less powerful starship and the Borg themselves were initially overcome by Federation weapons.
But not for long.
Of course the Death Star would win against a Borg cube and of course it would only happen once.
Also, I don’t know if there are anything near 1:1 power matches in Star Wars vs. Star Trek.
I just saw this in another thread so I’ll post it again.
Despite stars being everywhere, the Borg couldn’t adapt to the energy output of a solar flare. Crusher piloted the Enterprise into a Star’s Corona in Decent pt 2 and the Borg couldn’t adapt.
So I don’t believe the Borg could ever adapt to the energy output required to vaporize a planet in a single shot. Not even a solar flare could do what the Death Star did. A planet in a solar flare would be a fast roast instead of the instant vaporization that the Death Star is capable of.
That said, even though they never show it, they could cloak and attack given they have assimilated cultures with cloaking.
That wasn’t a normal Borg ship, though. They were cut off from the collective, and that has an effect on their ability to adapt.
In any case, the Borg don’t have to adapt to the Death Star by tanking the shot outright. They can adapt by letting the shot overpenetrate, thus having most of the energy dissapate into space. They are now a Borg Cube with a big hole in the side, but the Borg don’t give a shit about that. While the Death Star is recharging, they start beaming drones on board, and unless the commander hits the self destruct button before it’s disabled, the Borg will have themselves a Death Star.
They are now a Borg Cube with a big hole in the side,
Given the diameter of the death star is 480x bigger than the side of a Borg cube, the Death Star’s ray diameter is much larger than the entire Cube.
Or to put it into perspective, if you watched Star Wars on DVD and you were at the scene where the Death Star fills the screen, a Borg Cube would be 1 pixel in size. (DVD is 480 pixels tall).
A Mon Cal cruiser is 1200m long. A Borg Cube is 3000m to each side. The beam from DS2 didn’t fully engolf a Mon Cal.
Googling says that it was capable of different power levels. But if the super laser just punched a hole in something, then Alderan wouldn’t have blown up. It would just have had a tiny hole punched in it too.
But they can do speed, agility, numbers. The planet killer laser had a lengthy power up and cooldown
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I mean, there’s the question of if the death star might release so much energy as to be beyond the capacity of the borg to adapt. If I remember correctly, species 8472 had a planet destroying beam weapon that looked vaguely death-star esque in terms of how the beams combined, and the borg struggled against that species.
I agree that the power of the Death Star may be beyond the capacity of a cube to adapt/dissipate, but the major problem with 8472 was that the borg couldn’t successfully assimilate the species. One drone making it on the Death Star would likely be the end of the war, though depending on how easily the Borg could penetrate the death star’s shielding it might lose multiple cubes in the process.
though depending on how easily the Borg could penetrate the death star’s shielding
All it takes is stealing a cargo shuttle.
It’s an older code but it checks out
Oh sure, the borg would absolutely be able to destroy the thing in a fight, I assumed the question was more about withstanding it’s firepower
Scan death star, beam photon torpedoes into reactor core.
Sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to get an unbiased view of it. Groupthink is a powerful force and can sneak up on you without warning.
1:1 power matches in Star Wars vs. Star Trek.
V’ger vs the Death Star. V’Ger is ~82 au in size. That’s like 12 billion km in diameter. The Death Star is 120-160 km in diameter depending which version you’re talking about.
One of those energy discharges from V’ger would wipe the Death Star from the galaxy far far away.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily an “of course”. I can see the argument being made that the Death Star’s main laser is too powerful in sheer raw energy to be possible to adapt to. Or, going the other way, that its charge time and manoeuvrability is far too low to ever even get a single hit on a Borg cube.
So, here’s a thought; the Death Star’s superlaser is the only real laser weapon in Star Wars, while basically every other ranged weapon (blaster) is a plasma weapon. The main strength of the borg’s shields is that they’re able to adapt to phaser frequency, and while phasers are a completely fictional technology, they’re definitely not plasma. Do we know how well a borg cube’s shields would hold up against plasma? Is it possible that they’d go down to a barrage of Tie Fighter and Blaster Cannon fire, without the need to even use the superlaser?
Edit: OK, so I went down a rabbit hole on this, and this is what I learned about the Borg’s Adaptive Shield Matrix:
All phasers are generated on a particular subspace phase compression pulse frequency, whilst torpedo warheads all possess their own shielding which also possesses its own subspace phase compression pulse frequency. Adaptive Shielding works by remodulating the shields to the identical subspace compression pulse frequency of torpedos and phasers…
So, it seems like the Borg’s sheilds adapt to the subspace pulse frequencies of phasers and torpedos. Phasers are a type particle weapon that Gene Roddenberry made up when he realized lasers didn’t work the way he thought they did, and they don’t really have much basis in the real world like lasers or plasma weapons do.
Since the Adaptive Shield Matrix specifically works by adapting to subspace frequencies, there’s really no reason to think that their shields would have a distinct advantage over lasers or plasma bolts the way they do phasers. The fact the Picard was able to easily kill some Borg with hard-light bullets seems to back this up.
So, if the Borg shields don’t nullify the Death Star’s weapons like they do Star Trek starships, this just comes down firepower. The superlaser should be able to destroy any Borg cube multiple times, and even without the superlaser, they’re massively outgunned. This is 3000 meter ship against a 75 mile wide battle station. Even if the 10,000 turbolaser, 2,500 laser cannons, 2,500 ion cannons can’t overpower them (and by the way, it sounds like at least some of those, “lasers,” are actually plasma weapons based on wookiepedia, because of course Star Wars can’t be consistent), and the 768 tractor beam projectors can’t immobilize the cube, the 7,000 individual tie fighters would probably overwhelm the it. Hell, if the Death Star is faster, they could probably just smash into them and still survive the damage.
I think the Death Star has this by a mile. I hate to admit it, but I don’t see a win condition for the Borg here.
Plasma is trivial for Star Trek shields. We’ve seen Starfleet hide inside of stars before.
Are you talking about the time Beverly Crusher flew into a star? Because she did that specifically because the Borg didn’t have the right shielding to survive the sun’s corona.
Plasma weapons do exist in Star Trek in everything from small arms to ship sized weapons. The Romulans in Balance of Terror used plasma torpedoes and did a number on Star Fleet bases.
Interesting! According to this, plasma phasers were a proposed weapon against the Borg in Best of Both Worlds. I’ll have to rewatch it to be sure, but I think that adds weight to the idea that Borg shields are only really effective against phaser weapons.
Could a Borg cube stop a Nemesis style Picard maneuver, if deflecting the energy at impact was the only option?
Basically, if I took a high powered super rifle and pointed it at a Borg cube, how many shots do I get? Or, is the Stargate proposition correct, projectile attacks are so primitive that the Borg simply can’t defend themselves against it?
I imagine a laser weapon, any directed energy weapon for that matter, would be a short lived attack method against the Borg. The first shot, sure, it works. Maybe the second if it comes fast enough. But a hive mind super computer is going to adapt eventually and the Borg adapt quickly.
I don’t know, Borg shields seem highly selective in how they work. The ships shields seem like they function like every other starship shields, which would mean deflecting solid objects/phaser fire. The only difference is that they adapt to phaser frequencies, but that’s not entirely helpful since phasers are distinct from lasers and exclusive to Star Trek.
But the Borg also have personal sheilds that seem to only deflect phasers, since the crew are able to physically touch the borg when they’re shielded like this. Does this mean that the Borg’s ships shields actually can’t deflect physical objects?
Here’s another one; the personal borg shields can’t seem to stop Picard’s holodeck bullets in First Contact. Does that mean they can’t stop any physical objects, or does it mean they can’t stop hard light constructs? If they can’t stop hard light, can they even stop true laser fire?
The Borg shield COULDN’T stop hard light bullets, but the whole gimmick of the Borg is that they adapt to any weapon used against them, that holographic bullets wouldn’t work next time.
So, I don’t think that’s true. We’ve only ever seen them adapt their shields and weapons to phaser frequencies, and the rotating-frequency strategy was pretty effective throughout TNG and First Contact. It seems more like that adapting to phaser frequencies just piece of technology that assimilated rather than an having an innate ability to adapt to any attack.
Why is everyone assuming that the death star would use it’s superlaser (apparently that’s what it’s called) against the borg cube? The superlaser has a very low fire rate and I doubt it’s good in combat against any small moving target, and to the death star that’s what a borg cube is. The general armament of a death star seems completely useless against a borg cube because it would adapt to the regular turbo lasers almost immediately.
The first death star has a very low fire rate. Like hours if not a day between shots. The Death Star 2 had a fire rate of minutes. I would assume they are fielding the DS2.
Also we see the DS2 handling small quick moving capital ships in RotJ
I find it hard to believe they could improve that much from one version to the next.
The first one was sabotaged at the design phase. We know of at least 1 flaw introduced, why not more?
I’m just going off of the specs you can find on wookiepedia, and the battle at the end of RotJ where we see the thing fire multiple shots
Also it isn’t strictly canon, but in The Force Unleashed 1, they are test firing the DS1 every 30 seconds to a minute, well before the battle of Yavin
Legends somewhere said they shot the DS2 at fractional power. That’s all they needed to pwn a Mon Cal cruiser.
I think, while the death star could probably take out a borg cube, as mentioned by others with the size discrepancy alone, I think it becomes a potentially harder calculus if you field even two, potentially more, borg cubes. At that point, it sort of falls down to how the borg shields hold up against blasters and ion cannons, and that seems like kind of a shitfuck. There’s not a real answer to it, because both of them are either totally fictional or theoretical technologies. That maybe also holds true for things like the death star’s laser, but as others have said, there’s better analogues for that which we see the borg go up against and lose.
I think there’s also potentially an interesting difference here in how the Borg’s warp drive works vs Star wars hyperdrives. Could the Borg cube just jump right up to the death star and then board immediately? Could they bypass the laser by just warping in? I dunno, also a consideration, also unanswerable.
Would the death star be hackable? I dunno, the star wars computers might be too different, or even just too fucking old. They seem more fucked up than the star trek computers, anyways.
I dunno. They probably both get wiped by the halo ring, in any case.
But the cubes are pretty maneuverable. So yeah, the DS has the superlaser and a whole host of little guns, the odds of it being able to bring the superlaser to bear on the Cube are pretty small. Now, if you count all the fighters and bombers on the DS I’m pretty sure the Cube is toast. Overwhelming numbers of fighter lasers, bombers, and Death Star defense cannons.
I dunno. They probably both get wiped by the halo ring, in any case.
In that case: Borg or Flood?
Whoever said this doesn’t know either setting very well. Borg become resistant, not immune to weapons they encounter. Starships were still perfectly capable of damaging Borg ships with the same weapons years later.
The problem is that the two settings operate on entirely different scales. Individual Turbolaser bolts are something like thousands of 24th century Photon Torpedoes? Even if we assume the Cube can resist 90% of the energy from each bolt, it’s still having a very bad day.
What would the Borg do if Vader boarded their cube and went all Vader on them?
I lean more towards being a fan of Star Trek than Star Wars, but Vader is pretty powerful.
Vader at the peak of his power is pretty crazy. IMO it’d take a lot of drones to overwhelm him in a direct confrontation, but a cube has drones in the tens of thousands, so that’s at least in the realm of plausbility.
Most interesting cross-universe interaction is if the Force can be used to resist transporters, because spacing Vader is probably the best way to get rid of the threat. I think that’s a moot point though since the borg can (and do) blow up their own ships to eliminate even minor threats (see: the Borg Queen blowing up a cube of 64k drones for a couple deviants in Unimatrix Zero). So, their best chance is to transwarp to the middle of nowhere and self destruct the cube he’s on. If the ship’s detonation doesn’t take him out, just count on the cold equations of space to do the rest.
Conclusion: Darth Vader would pose a grave threat to any Borg facility he should choose to board, but the Collective is resilient enough to not really care about any damage he could do.
is if the Force can be used to resist transporters
The trained and genetically manipulated soldier in s03e11 of TNG “The Hunted”, could resist the teleporters to some extent, iirc. Or at least someone has resisted transporters at will. So I think Vader could too.
As I think on this more, we know that cloning an M-count is very difficult. Transporters typically need a good lock to even work. I don’t think you could lock onto someone with a M-count which may be why Stat Wars does not have teleporters.
Good analysis, only caveat that I’d add is that if they did warp out to the middle of nowhere, Palpatine might sense Vader is in trouble and go pick him up. As much as he hated him, he did need him. And light jumps in Star Wars seen arbitrarily fast, even ignoring the problematic “light skipping” from ep 9. They go from core systems to the outer rim like it’s nothing; Voyager would have been home for dinner if they had SW engines.
Definitely fair, the Borg are on the low end of scary as far as space zombies go and I’d say at that point we’re kind of running up against the fact that the Force does what the plot needs.
Yeah, especially with the sequels. I think George Lucas at least came up with a system to make the powers consistent and give limitations, but then Disney’s producers threw that all out and just took the approach of “we need x to happen… Let’s just use the force!” They really leaned in to the “don’t think about it too much, it’s just a movie” approach to world and plot building.
I did think of one specific thing that the Borg are significantly better than the Empire at: time travel. Everyone and their mother in Trek does it, and the Borg do it while on the run in First Contact. Meanwhile, (spoilers for a show that ended 6 years ago) the Emperor’s desire+inability to control a force-based time nexus is a subplot in Rebels to the point where he decides his best option is to try parleying with the heroes. So, if Vader became a persistent threat the Collective’s best chance would be to zip into the past and kill/assimilate child Anakin./
All that said, any ideas as to how this might work really falls apart when you look at temporal mechanics across universes. Trek canonically has a fluid (though resilient) timeline, this was stated onscreen in SNW. What little we see in Rebels indicates that Star Wars has a single stable timeline (one character survives a duel in Season 2 this way), and you can argue that this squares with Force precognition (including most notably the clear and unambiguous visions courtesy of the Mortis Gods in TCW).
That makes rebels sound more interesting. Not sure why but the descriptions on Disney+ made it seem dry and I haven’t gotten around to starting it. I like media that plays with time travel. And I think Ahsoka is in it, my favorite Jedi/non-jedi force user.
Watching through her namesake show and I love that when she was talking about her apprentice’s anger, she didn’t go into a lecture about the dark side like Yoda would. IMO the Jedi fear of the dark side was a huge blind spot (and I really wish Disney hadn’t gotten rid of the original post OT storyline where Luke turns to the dark side and then turns back when he doesn’t want to follow orders because the dark side wasn’t the one way path the Jedi thought it was… Instead of the whole “Ben might turn, better kill him!” they replaced it with).
But yeah, I think the Borg really personifies the whole idea that once a civilization gets to type II, it won’t likely ever go extinct. I’m not sure if either of them are technically type II, but the Borg are much closer than the Empire was. If the question was “who would win an all out war” IMO the answer is unquestionably the Borg. I’m having a hard time thinking of another sci-fi or fantasy faction that could take on the Borg in an all out war without some deux ex machina level abilities. Even the federation would probably fall if the Borg decided to focus all of their attention on a war with them, and that’s before any kind of time travel even enters the equation (though future federation might be a different situation). Though that’s with the caveat of the most recent series I’ve seen is Enterprise, no idea if anything in the more recent ones challenges that.
I imagine they’d attempt to assimilate him. I think it’s conceivable they’d eventually succeed, and this would go poorly for everyone involved.
He’s taken on armies solo, and not just the men, but the armor and aircraft, too.
The Borg aren’t exactly fast or agile, though they might be able to gain tactical advantage. It’s impossible to surprise Vader, but it is possible they could overwhelm him. I think it will depend on how many drones are on a cube and how quickly they realize they need to send all of them at him at once.
Though their transporter tech could also potentially defeat him easily. And if they can hack into his suit, it’s pretty much over for him.
And imagine if they figured out medichlorians from assimilating him and turned them into an injection they give all drones.
I think the hacking of his suit would be his downfall from the Borg.
Could the Borg even adapt to being mentally choked? Would he kill 2 or 3 and then the next one is just like “Oh yeah, choke me harder Sith Daddy?”
I don’t know if they are susceptible to choking in general, but even if not, there’s plenty of things inside them that telekinesis could seriously fuck up. Though the same applies to people, not sure if the lack of seeing something like that is a lack of creativity or some limitation on the ability.
I’m more curious if their fancy green shields would help them against such an attack. Though I guess they are “Force fields.” 😏
If it’s a force field a force user might gain power from it. They’d need a force shield to become immune to the force 🙃
Am I the only one that hasn’t heard this one?
I hadn’t seen it before, but I’m also not seeing anyone saying they have seen it before? I know lemmy.world is having federation difficulties, but I checked how this post appears on there and still didn’t see any comments to that effect. Are there other instances I should check that are also having problems?
I mean this is presented as an old joke, but I’ve never heard it.
Oh I see. To me it looks like it’s presented as very old, but not widely-known. Something that happened a long time ago in a couple of small niche communities.
The only one… so far.
Oops, that doesn’t work here.
Yes
Doesn’t the death star have no shield? It has been years since I watched the movie, but I remember the shield coming from a generator on the planet. So, just move the fight somewhere away from the planet and light them up.
That was the second death star that was still under construction. When fully built they were shielded.
Thanks! How was Luke able to fly along the original death star and launch a torpedo into its exhaust port if it was shielded?
The shielding in star wars is “Ray shielding” I reckon it doesn’t stop ships.
There is a moment in the first movie where they buffet going through the shield of I recall.
That is the problem when talking different sci-fi worlds. It’s all made uo and specific to the rules of that world.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If a ship can fly through a shield, then a torpedo can fly through a shield. They’re both physical objects moving at a fast pace. If it was an issue of specific kinetic energy being rebuffed, then they could just modify the torpedo to slow it down. I guess that’s why I haven’t been a big Star Wars fan since I was a kid. I can’t stop myself from asking these questions, and Star Wars usually doesn’t bother answering them.
That’s fair. Star Wars never really tried to be hard science fiction. It was always a space opera or science fantasy.
Right. A torpedo in space doesn’t have to maintain a minimum speed to stay flying like in air. And actually doesn’t have to be aerodynamic.
Doesn’t the death star have no shield?.. I remember the shield coming from a generator on the planet
That’s true of the second Death Star. I forget whether there was any shield on the first DS or not, or whether there may have ended up being a shield over the second DS if it had been completed.
Anyone else played VGAPlanets back in the day? Or perhaps yesterday?
Of course we all know Borg cube or death star, sg1 will find some half assed blow shit stuff up way to destroy both of them. Like idk blowing up a star.
Real question, Atlantis vs Borg cube or death star…(Assuming they had full zpms)
All you need is a P90 and the Borg are finished.
Source (including Borg tree): https://youtu.be/NjlCVW_ouL8
The thing about trek and wars fans is that humanity has the biggest baddest guns in their respective universe.
Gate fans know we tau’ri are inferior in technology, internal politics, weapons, manpower, and even our biology compared to the goa’uld and jaffa, the Asguard, and the replications.
We have a massive inferiority complex and we are fully aware that we are just hairless apes bumbling around in the dark, fiddling with tech that we barely, if at all understand.
The real question is Borg vs Cybermen. Who assimilates who? And will Dr. Picwho be able to save us from the resulting super hybrids?
People always debate Wars vs Trek but forget Blazers. Death Star absolutely loses to Wave Motion Gun
I didn’t forget Blazers, I’ve never heard of it before. And to be honest, my Googling was less-than-stellar just now, too. Is it an anime?
Picturing the Death Star being rocked by explosions and some random Stormtrooper in the coolest suit of armor ever seen who’s all fucked up hobbles up to a button and is like “Adapt to this, bantha poodoo” and slams a fist onto the button, shooting the planet destroying laser at the cube as both vessels explode like Alderaan in the special edition remaster of New Hope.
