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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.
There's that one scene where they talk about laser armaments on an attacking ship and Picard just looks disgusted and amused.
They are locking “lasers” on us. 😏😏
Ahh, but were they superlasers? Or even turbolasers?
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.
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.
It blew up because it's a plot point not because George Lucas was running simulations on a super computer in the 80s to calculate a planetary explosion.
Well sure, Star Wars is entirely ridiculous. But it's also not without precedent. The most famous is President Kennedy's head exploding when shot instead of a clean hole. So even if the Death Star used a small starship blast instead of planet blast, you wouldn't get a clean hole punched through unless that's what the plot called for.
thats..... thats not how physics works. A bullet projectile has velocity. A space laser doesn't.
The Space laser does have velocity. Even ignoring that photons have velocity c, we are shown it moving on screen. E=mc^2. m is mass. A large enough energy is equivalent to a large mass.
The reason you don't think of a laser as making something explode is because your only experience is seeing something like a laser cutter where the energy is so low it carefully burns away the material rather than deliver so much energy that the atoms don't have time to slowly oxidize and waft away into gas. It's like if you only saw a water jet (which moves tiny bits of abrasives at high speed) cut material and concluded that a bullet couldn't make a head explode.
Which is beside the point that we see Star wars and Trek getting blasted and exploding with only rarely a clean hole being made (like the Borg cutting ray).
Edit:
Here's a high speed video of a laser hitting a surface.
https://youtu.be/HGFQvYdeKQg?si=ja9vw1UJ_E2z2TjH
I doubt the borg would bother with a frontal assault on a death star. Just put some probes into a host and wait for assimilation.
Oh, man. If the Borg knew about strategy, Star Trek would end right at the time the first cube gets to Earth.
Honestly that kinda sounds like it would be a fucking DOPE take on a star trek horror movie. A science crew doing science on a nebula crash on a local planet after a mysterious problem with the warp reactor. One by one, they all start assimilating. The borg have changed the game and the nanoprobes are airborne. The crew must escape alive to alert the federation or earth will be lost.
Many lights fail due to the accident, and on the darker areas people just disappear... Hum, wait, I think I've seen that movie. Is there a human captain studying Borg nano-probes and feeding researchers to them?
What's the movie? Little Shop of Horrors?
But they can do speed, agility, numbers. The planet killer laser had a lengthy power up and cooldown
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.
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.
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.