this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024

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Who would win: Borg Cube or Death Star? (aussie.zone)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I dunno. They probably both get wiped by the halo ring, in any case.

In that case: Borg or Flood?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I'd love to say flood but a small squad tends to fuck em up somehow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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?"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm more curious if their fancy green shields would help them against such an attack. Though I guess they are "Force fields." 😏

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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 🙃

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I think the hacking of his suit would be his downfall from the Borg.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The real question is Borg vs Cybermen. Who assimilates who? And will Dr. Picwho be able to save us from the resulting super hybrids?

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