Why didn't your borg assimilate the Federation

So why didn't they assimilate Federation space? They tried didn't they. Oh it was species 8724. NOT. They could have sent an extra cube. Oh it was the Queen. NOT she's lame. Oh it was the fact that it would end the series. NOT Picards to pimp he would a figured away to stop countless borg ships. so why didn't they send anything of worth to scoop up our friends in red blue and gold uniforms. I will tell you why.
Q.
Thats right. The first time they meet the Humans, System J24, they are about to gobble up a tiny little ship whose defense could not withstand them. They even threatend to punish them if they resisted. and right as they were about to bust out and take the Enterprise BAM Tran-trans-trans warp drive. Well where the hell did that come from? That silly Queen must have been shocked. So she looks through the Federation Data base and learns about Q. OMG>this super being is buddy buddy with Picard. He MUST be important. So lets get him.
Guess what. He is so pimp he overrides assimilation and blows up a cube that the humans were able to give commands to. HOLY MOLEY...this picard guy must be a Q also! That silly queen didn't know what to do. If she sent in an aramada Picard/Q would just eat it up. Okay lets focus on our own backyard she must have said.
Voyager? well lets take a look. HOLY COW Janeway is buddy buddy with one too. And look she is busting in and out of time anomolies,and rewriting universal law. she must be a Q- or at least think she is. That silly borg Queen must have been really upset. Those rotten humans and that talking Q. Hmmf.
Well thats why I think the borg never really tried to invade Federation space... They just sent in a cube every now and again to see if the Q were still paying attention.

[This message has been edited by Thundergod (edited 09-08-2001).]

Hehehe!

Some interesting points http://216.40.212.6/Board/ubb/wink.gif

I like to go by the other hand. When the cube scanned their database. They found the Creators home and had to be one with it http://216.40.212.6/Board/ubb/wink.gif

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SIR SIG

More then meets the eye,
His a MapMaker in disguise.

Well to answer the question dierctly "Why didn't your borg assimilate the federtaion?"

Becuase then my game would be all about playing the bORG or a very dark and long struggle to eventually be assimilated...not what my players and I were looking for http://216.40.212.6/Board/ubb/smile.gif

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Captain Zymmer
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Visit Star Trek:Lexington at;
http://www.usslexington.net
=-=-=-=-=-=

Because in the end, we're playing Star Trek, and in Star Trek, good always finds a way to win vs evil.

The Federation is right and good and will always triumph.

It might look scary, and temporary failure is possible, but some how, things will work out in the end. They always do.

Alex

Because, in my Trek universe, Starfleet always uses the one advantage we have over the Collective - individuality. Individual starship captains will always pull some stunt that's so off-the-wall that the Borg can't see it coming. Sure, they have the tactical knowledge of thousands of species. I know lots of people, some almost as well as I know myself - but they can still surprise me.

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"Spatial anomalies, energy beings, telepathic echoes. You know, sometimes I really miss the Dominion War. At least then all we had to worry about was where the next polaron beam was coming from...": Capt.Hunter, USS Tempest

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Quote:

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Originally posted by StyroFoam Man:
[B]They're afraid of That Damn Fish...

a Maalon waste hauler....

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Wow, that was one well travelled fish. Bet the Maalon gave it indigestion. http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif



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In the Praetors Name!

Cpt Roper?

Did he have a few tentacles? lol http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif

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SIR SIG

More then meets the eye,
His a MapMaker in disguise.

This message has been removed on request by the
poster

The Klingon Misunderstanding??

OMG that is one of the funniest thing's I've read!!! ROTFLOLCUAL!! http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif

I've heard:
The Klingon War
The Klingon Crisis.
The Khitomer Breakdown
The Khitomer Incidents
The Second Federation/Klingon War

But, "The Klingon Misunderstanding" - that definitely takes the cake! I LOVE it!

http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.trekrpg.net/Board/ubb/biggrin.gif

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"Every atom in our bodies was forged in the furnace of ancient stars - it is our destiny to return home..."

Well, what it all comes down to is that whatever Q wants, Q gets. Hey, doesn't that make Q a deity?

But, actually, I will give you a semi-serious answer, which might be even funnier than if tried to be funny. The Borg haven't assimilated the Federation because they keep sending one or two cubes at a time to do it.

Why is this? Because they must need their vast fleets of cubes for something else. Apparently, the Feds are just not that high a priority with them.

Why are the Feds so low priority? Well, for starters they are basically two primitive to be that interesting. Of course, they are advanced enough to have beaten the half-hearted Borg attempts at conquest, so that aren't THAT uninteresting. There must be something else.

What else? Well, it all comes down to Bad Ass Aliens. There must be someone on the other side of the Collective who is so mean, so aggressive, and so tough that the Collective needs most of their cubes just to contain them.

So, let's narrow the topic. Who could beat the Borg? The Krenim? They are certainly advanced enough, and they have Really Cool Uniforms to demoralize the enemy. But, we really don't know how powerful they are in the recently restored timeline, so it could be someone else.

Who?

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Slan agat!

I miss these old threads :)

Here's my take on it;

They've got crappy AI when it comes to combat.

Anyone remember the old days of computer gaming when if you did something really weird in a Real-time strategy the compuet game would freak, and start doing stupid things?

I figure the Borg suffer from the same damn thing. Be it either by the Q sending Picard into Borg space or them blowing up the cube over Earth; the Borg are confused about what exactly happened and why.

So now the Borg instead of mounting a large, concentrated and focused attack, they send one Cube at a time in a straight line towards the enemy HQ. Just like int he old Warcraft games when you'd destroy a starting enemy structure or you would block their unit movements to force them to go around a certain area.

The Borg are simply twits when it comes to long-range space tactics. Anyway what have they had to deal with in their space? The Hirogen, the Kazon, Maalon, Vidiians, Talaxians, and many more which don't seem to either a centralized authority to create a large space fleet or have a means to operate in a group. Only species 8472 provided the Borg with a challenge, and they still used the basic tactic that Gheorghi Joukov used in WW2, hordes of men.

At least, that's my reasoning.:)

Because I've never used the Borg in my game. I have a hard time balancing them- either they're the "mega-powerful superbeings no one can stop" like they were on TNG or they're the "pathetically weak Borg that the ENT-E took out in a single well-placed volley of fire in First Contact." Personally, I don't like either.

An author named Jack Williamson created a race of robots for a series of stories. They were called simply, "The Humanoids". This was some time ago, you might need to be a certified Old Fart to remember them.

Anyway, he was once asked why he didn't write more stories about them, and their attempts to overwhelm the galaxy (but in a nice way). His reply was along the lines of "because I didn't want to write a story where they would win. I couldn't write a story about them losing that wouldn't contradict established facts. I made them too well."

I think this is what the first Trek writers did with the Borg. They were popular, so the writers wanted to bring them back. So they had to dumb them down, or otherwise, they couldn't write a story where the Borg wouldn't win.

One might use them, post Voyager, by assuming that the destruction of their transwarp hub caused significant overloads and breakdowns of the other five hubs. Of course, this presumes you're willing to accept that (1) the transwarp hub would be as easily destroyed as it was, and (2) they'd never heard of building in excess capacity to handle node failure. Hey, in a world where you can talk a computer into shorting itself out, anything's possible. :)

Anyway, this would make the collective a series of small, disconnected fiefdoms, each evolving it its own way, possibly warring with the others on rediscovery. There could be collectives as small as a single scout ship, on up to as large as the remnants of a hub, depending on what you need.

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Originally posted by AslanC
I miss these old threads :)

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And you ressurected this one on what ... a whim???

Someone pointed it out to me, I think it was Matt.

Just reminded me of the old days when we all didn't think Trek sucked, except for maybe Voyager ;)

You got a problem with that Sig? ;)

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Originally posted by AslanC
Just reminded me of the old days when we all didn't think Trek sucked, except for maybe Voyager ;)

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Ahh, those were the days... :D

Moderator hat on...

Discussion of the suckitude or non-suckitude of Trek isn't appropriate to the Narrator's Forum and should be directed to the Star Trek Chat area.

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Originally posted by AslanC
Someone pointed it out to me, I think it was Matt.

Just reminded me of the old days when we all didn't think Trek sucked, except for maybe Voyager ;)

You got a problem with that Sig? ;)

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Yeh I do :D

Still with the 'I miss these old threads' comment it sounded more like you wanted the thread back up for the sake of a post ;)

If it were me, I might've added another line or two with a reason for doing so. :p

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Originally posted by SIR SIG
Still with the 'I miss these old threads' comment it sounded more like you wanted the thread back up for the sake of a post ;

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Now when have I ever given a crap about how many posts I have? :p

I all seriousness I am not debating the general suckitude of Star Trek I am debating the lack of creativity towards Trek.

There used to be threads lke this all the time.

Now they are rare, and getting rarer.

So I thought this would be fun :)

In my last real Series, the Collective and the Dominion had a war all but unknown to the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. This is roughly what happened:

Unbeknownst to the Federation, the Klingons or the Romulans, a Borg sphere encountered an unstable wormhole in a far-spinward region of the Delta Quadrant. This anomaly led the sphere to a region in the Gamma Quadrant controlled by the Dominion.

After the sphere assimilated a trio of Dominion attack ships, a battle cruiser and several other attack ships arrived on scene and engaged the sphere. Despite the two dozen ships that engaged the Borg vessel, only a single attack cruiser survived the assault. Dominion reinforcements arrived in the sector and once again engaged the Collective.

The second engagement proved more effective when several scores of attack ships assaulted the sphere kamikaze-style, damaging it severely. Thousands of Jem’Hadar shock troops boarded the sphere and engaged the Borg drones in hand-to-hand combat. While the casualties were enormous, the Dominion proved successful… but what the cost?

Unbeknownst to the Dominion fleet, the Borg had dispatched a message to the Collective via their interplexing beacon, informing them of the massive Dominion. The signal took several weeks to reach Unimatrix 01, but when it did the Collective immediately dispatched a fleet of fifteen battle cubes to invade and assimilate its new adversary. Unfortunately the unstable wormhole that had carried the first sphere to Dominion space had collapsed.

Using transwarp technologies, the Collective’s armada arrived in the Gamma Quadrant late shortly after the conclusion of the Dominion War. The Founders, however, were ready. Millions of newly-designed Jem’Hadar soldiers impervious to Borg assimilation nanoprobes and thousands of vessels sporting new, experimental high-energy weapons met the Borg cues in battle near the Omarian Nebula. The carnage was on a scale previously unknown to either combatant.

In a war that lasted nearly five years, the Dominion and the Collective were both devastated and left in ruins. The template for the central intelligence of the Collective was disrupted and eventually destroyed by an invasion of nearly forty million Jem’Hadar troops, thus preventing any further incarnations of the Borg Queen. The Founders were almost all killed by a high-yield multikinetic neutronic device detonated near their planet that destroyed not only their solar system by a number of others within a radius of a few parsecs. In defeating an apparently unbeatable foe, both sides lost the war. Truly a Pyrrhic victory on all sides.

Small groups of Jem’Hadar and Vorta remained under the tenuous control of the few Founders not killed by the attack. Still others found salvation with the Son'a, the only other known species capable of producing the life-sustaining Ketracel White. A fair number of Vorta and Jem'Hadar were "converted" to the Son'a cause using advanced genetic reprogramming techniques, and even now the few remaining Son'a still hostile to the United Federation of Planets are plotting their revenge.

Borg vessels scattered throughout the galaxy attempted to function as mini-collectives, yet most ended in self-destruction. A single Borg probe, severely damaged, managed to enter the Beta Quadrant. It transported a very precious cargo as far from the conflict-ridden war zone as possible. What it carried was the sole surviving copy of the Collective’s core backup systems. The goal was to locate an inhabited planet, assimilate the population, and begin building a new hive. The result of this journey remains unknown.

This is all post-Voyager, of course, but it provides a useful set of tools for the crafting of a new Series where the Borg are a newer, deadlier threat, the Dominion is in ruins but the dangers it spawned still remain, and old enemies have gained a powerful new edge for settling their score with the UFP.

mactavish out.

Nice work Mactavish!

Nice work my man!

Did you run this as a campaign or is it just theoretical? I mean did your players learn what happened?

They learned bits and pieces, but the Series ended abruptly when two of my players left Michigan for Washington. Its a bit hard to play face-to-face when they live on the other side of the freakin' country! ;)

I would really like to start a new Series that incorporates this data, but my gamers have long since went their separate ways and its hard to get together more than two or three times a year.

Hey, here's an idea: why don't a bunch of you guys move to Michigan so that I can slake my Star Trek RPG thirst? There's lots of jobs here and the weather is ... well ... there's lots of jobs!

mactavish out.

Quote:

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Originally posted by mactavish
Hey, here's an idea: why don't a bunch of you guys move to Michigan so that I can slake my Star Trek RPG thirst? There's lots of jobs here and the weather is ... well ... there's lots of jobs!

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Well, (un)fortunately I've got a great job and am building a house right now...

Hey, here's an idea: why don't you guys come and move to Utah? :D The weather is exciting, low crime, great skiing and...did I mention low crime? ;)

Utah? Salt flats and mormons. I have to give that a miss.

Or you could both move to Montreal, we have lots of great stuff here, including health care, hot french women and awesome Old European atmosphere in a modern setting :)

No downsides I can think of there ;)

Since I haven't seen Voyager's dealing with the Borg, I'll gladly ignore whatever I don't like in it for the sake of my own continuity :p

In my view, the Borgs are just like seen in BOBW and FC : nearly unstoppable. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding is the android Data : he managed to link with Picard (something the Borg clearly hadn't envisioned at the time, since Locutus wanted him to be dismantled), and encrypted the E-E's computer so that they couldn't access it.
After BOBW's frontal attack failed because of Data, they tried a temporal attack (using the cube as a decoy), and failed again, still because of Data. Quite puzzled by that, they are now evaluating again the state of the Beta Quadrant to make their next strike successful - all the while dealing with other powers. After all, there may be some resistance elsewhere in the Delta Quadrant (apart from Species 8472).

Posted by Aslan:

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Utah? Salt flats and mormons. I have to give that a miss.

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What's wrong with Mormons?!

In my neighberhood we have two guys who make the rounds. Nicest bunch of people I have met in a long time, even if you don't care much for their religion. If everyone is like this in Utah I'm sold.:D

Bad parts about Montreal? Its not Toronto.:D j/k

[Edited to make my French Canadian friends more comfortable.]

On an unrelated note, I'm told Utah is lovely.

But concerning the Borg, I agree that they should be nigh invincible save when confronted by a force such as the Dominion. My goal was to destroy both groups in order to rebuild them to suit my needs.

I hated the Dominion, mainly due to the whole changeling aspect. I would have preferred the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar as the pawns of someone, just not a group of gelatinous goobers.

mactavish out.

IMC, they were stopped at first by massive attacks and/or unorthodox tactics, then, with the advent of the newer weaponry (pulse phaser, quantum torpedo, multi-layered shielding), I'd say they missed the boat on the Federation the first time and Starfleet found ways to send their adaptation advantage down the drain (how would they adapt to infinite frequencies, unless they actually had infinite memory), and they can now only rely on their inexistant tactics (in short, if I ever use them, they're not invincible, as about the three quarters of TNG destroyed this image, and they either appear as random conversation about news from afar in a Starbase bar, or they're sending a scout looking for a way to pierce through the Federation defences)... I personnaly hate to be faced with a Deus ex Machina as a player, and as a Narrator, I try to avoid those as cheap ways to scare my players...

[Edited out as unnecessary, but you didn't really have to edit it out :), I was not really in the best of moods before I read it]

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Well. As Narrator I wanted to have a playable game universe, and as has already been said. Getting all your players to play souless, emotionless, personality-shy drones slaved to the will of the greater collective...

...Is immediatly obvious as a REALLY bad game concept.

Which leaves the Borg as the Bad Guys. And there you then have to decide if you will use the true Borg, or the Borg that can be beaten (we have been calling them 'Pussy Borg' for some time now).

While the first is an unbeatable foe, truely scary, and eventually invulnerable to any attack.

The other appears to be, except for one blatant flaw. So obvious its like painting a target on it.

I prefer the former, but have to give the players a chance, and so usually end up with the Hybrid as seen in First Contact. However my players have a chance.

They have assimilated Federation Tech, and so the 'no interest, no threat' clause applies. Put simply a Federation vessel (unless testing a new piece of tech) is beneath the collectives notice. They could fly in formation with a Borg ship, and as long as the Borg do not perceive you as a threat, they pay you no mind. Put simply they ignore you.

Fat lot of good to the Federation ship that feels it has to place itself in the way of a Borg assimilation of another group!

Basically, the Borg are a Plot device, like the Q. They are big, bad and dangerous to know. But unlike the Q, if you want to avoid them. Go the other way. I use them as a test of morals, to see if the crew are still 'Starfleet'. Or as a big fat Stop sign indicating the current path is wrong.

Sure you can still go one on one with a Borg Cube. But unless you have a cunning trick to pull out of your arse, you ARE going to die. Basically you have to surprise me as GM with this trick. Do not plan on remodulating phasers, using projectiles (real or holographic), or even going hand to hand... And when you do surprise me, dont assume the trick will work twice.

They will adapt. They will keep coming. They will always use the same plan, using sheer weight of numbers to its advantage. Its not nice, its not fair, and there are plenty of built in flaws to the rule above to save a creative player. But if you want to play with the bear...