[alt-trek] after BOBW

[JALU3]

Cut, how does one counter act an anti-matter explosion? How strong would the shields need to be to have 0 penetration of the ships shields?

Or maybe the goal of the cube really wasn't to invade earth, and that was more of a seconday mission. Maybe the goal was to create the transwarp conduit which terminates just outside of the Sol System . . . or was it vice versa. For it the conduit existed there the entire time, wouldn't it have made logical sense for them to already have assimulated the Sol system at their earliest convenience while the Federation was unaware of the threat which they would be be?

Or better yet, why must we use the borg drones . . . Starfleets ships computers appear to be very independent, and rarely networked completely. However, they do network . . . imagine a worm virus which would infect all of the Federation computers overtime. . . which at a set preprogrammed date, make the ships sentient agents of the borg, and use the ships abilities to replicate items to replicate pods that would assimulate the all the biological entities that cross infront of it . . . on all ships, stations, homes, etc, at the exact same time?

This provides a large rush of drones in a short time, in multiple locations, on multiple planets, in multiple systems, in multiple sectors, all at once.

[Tobian]

You know something struck me as a spin off idea of some of the material you guys are churning out...

What would happen if a Borg cube came into the Federation, then was ALMOST defeated, but it did something quite unexpected.. A parting mission, much like the Borg sphere in First contact, separated, and flew off, before anyone could catch it.. somewhere nearby... but then what would happen if all of the long range communications systems in the Federation started winking out.. Instead of infecting the humans, they infected the computer network! The immediate effect would be the Borg would have all access to almost everything in the Federation, and Everyone in the Federation would be completely cut off. Ships on deep space missions might not even notice at first, and colonies and species as much as 5000 Lightyears away might take months to fully appreciate what was going on - the Federation is huge and it relies on it's communications network to exist!

Rather than being a complete 'Armageddon' scenario, it would be more sinister, and scary.. Suddenly the fleet doesn't know where anyone else is, unless they are in long range sensor range, but they can't communicate. Something keeps infecting the comms systems. No one knows where the Borg are operating from.. a few guesses, but since there's no coordinated effort, and fringe ships have no clue what's going on might fear the worse, that Earth and the Federation have been assimilated, and flee, or be lured into the honey trap of going in to investigate, on at a time!

you could have a number of spawned adventures based on the theme.. trying to find allies, anyone who has a clue what's going on.. Maybe the Borg occasionally get the replicators on ships to begin replicating Borg Nanites, which attempt to assimilate people (Imagine if you drank Earl gray with Borg nanites in it!!!) You maybe would get pockets of resistance, such as many byanus, one of the few cultures able to fight off such a sophisticated virus, or an elite pocket cadre of scientists working to try and cure it, trapped at an institute. You'd have world wide problems, such as starvation, if all the replicator or even transport connections are not working (how do you get food about!) which would heavily waylay any ship flying by!

it would be a good way of giving the impression of 'the end of the world' without actually DOING it, (as I read in a game book recently, you can only blow up the world once! ) - there'd still be horrific challenges, a great deal of terror, the unknown and great danger, but a lot of it would be in the players heads, and from the general issues of complete communications breakdowns!

It's hard to imagine that the whole alpha and beta quadrant species we know wouldn't also be affected. The Klingons - definitely, they share the Federations communications technology. The Romulans probably, the Cardassians, depends on the era, but likely - we all grew up in each others pockets and share comms protocols, and stole each others' technology hehe

The Borg aren't just frightening because they are 'Zombies' but because of the technologies they wield!

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Cut, how does one counter act an anti-matter explosion? How strong would the shields need to be to have 0 penetration of the ships shields?

Interphasic shielding.

[JALU3]

You know something struck me as a spin off idea of some of the material you guys are churning out...

What would happen if a Borg cube came into the Federation, then was ALMOST defeated, but it did something quite unexpected.. A parting mission, much like the Borg sphere in First contact, separated, and flew off, before anyone could catch it.. somewhere nearby... but then what would happen if all of the long range communications systems in the Federation started winking out.. Instead of infecting the humans, they infected the computer network! The immediate effect would be the Borg would have all access to almost everything in the Federation, and Everyone in the Federation would be completely cut off. Ships on deep space missions might not even notice at first, and colonies and species as much as 5000 Lightyears away might take months to fully appreciate what was going on - the Federation is huge and it relies on it's communications network to exist!

Rather than being a complete 'Armageddon' scenario, it would be more sinister, and scary.. Suddenly the fleet doesn't know where anyone else is, unless they are in long range sensor range, but they can't communicate. Something keeps infecting the comms systems. No one knows where the Borg are operating from.. a few guesses, but since there's no coordinated effort, and fringe ships have no clue what's going on might fear the worse, that Earth and the Federation have been assimilated, and flee, or be lured into the honey trap of going in to investigate, on at a time!

you could have a number of spawned adventures based on the theme.. trying to find allies, anyone who has a clue what's going on.. Maybe the Borg occasionally get the replicators on ships to begin replicating Borg Nanites, which attempt to assimilate people (Imagine if you drank Earl gray with Borg nanites in it!!!) You maybe would get pockets of resistance, such as many byanus, one of the few cultures able to fight off such a sophisticated virus, or an elite pocket cadre of scientists working to try and cure it, trapped at an institute. You'd have world wide problems, such as starvation, if all the replicator or even transport connections are not working (how do you get food about!) which would heavily waylay any ship flying by!

it would be a good way of giving the impression of 'the end of the world' without actually DOING it, (as I read in a game book recently, you can only blow up the world once! ) - there'd still be horrific challenges, a great deal of terror, the unknown and great danger, but a lot of it would be in the players heads, and from the general issues of complete communications breakdowns!

It's hard to imagine that the whole alpha and beta quadrant species we know wouldn't also be affected. The Klingons - definitely, they share the Federations communications technology. The Romulans probably, the Cardassians, depends on the era, but likely - we all grew up in each others pockets and share comms protocols, and stole each others' technology hehe

The Borg aren't just frightening because they are 'Zombies' but because of the technologies they wield!

Tobain, have you thought of entering the Absolutely evil GM club? I hear that some bars give a discount for their pints of beer with membership.

It's like a notch down from mine, but more terrifying. I guess we are so use to the Idea of wide area, world wide, networking that it isn't even a second thought to us. Yet in the Star Trek Universe, even though they widely share data, the computers for the most part appear to be networked and synced up only on occasion, only sharing burst of data at a time, rather then a constant active link. However, that doesn't sound unlike the early, and parts, of the present WWW.

So your ideas would be very possible . . . but what would trip some systems to go off line and act rebellious, and other systems to be ineffective . . . maybe it would be a graduale thing . . . power fluctuations . . . the replicators giving the wrong food items . . . the temperature being slightly off . . . then corrects itself before anyone gets the wiser, and then gives false data during low to medium level diagnostics, hiding itself and learning and sharing data with other infective systems to stealth their way into vital networks such as communications, replication, energy, and other automated systems which the populace have become unknowingly dependent on.

What the turbolifts aren't functioning to the 50th floor? You mean this building has stairs?!?
Computers start giving false information to children. "What did you learn today child.", a mother says to their home schooled girl. "That the borg are our friends and, are here to make our lives better.", and pauses "You really should resist them Mommy."

Man, the thoughts of what a computer bug like that can do. OMG. And maybe parts of it evolve to be more stealthy and cunning, while offshoots are brutal, unpretentious, even boastful . . . and more akin to create computer controlled biological drones.

After several years, parts of it might even consider itself more advance then the Borg which created it . . . looking to remold their makers closer to their image.

[JALU3]

Interphasic shielding.

Do Borg have access to that tech? Wasn't that developed after BoBWs?

[Tobian]

The TNG series Borg, as I recall had a simple magnetic shield to prevent beaming. The strength of their technology was a massively strong SIF - when you ships go into combat with the Borg.. they fire directly onto the hull... not shields. Largely the Borg don't seem to operate them, like normal species. The SIF seems more to be operating on the local level, massively boosting an area's structural integrity... Remember when the Enterprise caught the Borg with their pants down, when Q took them to go visit... The Enterprise blasted a huge hunk of ship out of there, there were no shields... Then the Borg adapted, they improved, and suddenly... nothing did any damage!

in Voyager I recall Seven installed multi-spacial shielding on a probe, which then went on to the Delta Flyer, however that doesn't implicitly mean that's what the Borg use... just what she could implement using Voyager's technology... Don't forget, she knew how Trans-warp conduits were made, she just couldn't make one with the resources Voyager had!

[Tobian]

haha thanks Jalu3 - it was one of my better ideas haha. It could make for a good campaign as the player characters try and restore the Federation, along with everyone else of course, but they would be totally cut off!

The way I see it... A Ship could, because it's a single computer organism, with respects to it's self, could basically 'reboot' and manually disable their comms array, once they detected such an invasion, but then that's the point! It leaves it totally unable to open comms, just in case that virus is being transmitted! you couldn't even have comms from you to your away party! Scary new stuff!

My vision is that the Borg inhabit a major Comms hub.. It might just be a few hundred of them, BUT the point is such places might be minimally operated, so in any tactical sense the thing should be easy to take over. Then it radically begins spreading the Borg virus (essentially a form of the collective) throughout the high-speed relays in the Federation, entrenching it's self in each one and spreading out. Regions might find themselves free of the virus, but then who can they contact, and they are constantly under data attack from any nearby Borg signal.

The way I see it is that the Federation needs to use high-speed comms hubs, to speed up communication throughout the Federation, it's so huge, to get even delayed communication, you're going to need a hell of a lot of high-gain signal boosters all over the place. The Problem for the players is many fold. From a 'central' hub the Borg could essentially ghost their operations to all of the surrounding hubs. Sure that site's administrator could tell them there's no Borg there, just a damn virus he's having a bad day disabling, but he can't send a signal either! So they would have to fly to any major 'obvious target' and hope they have picked the right one, and destroy the actual, physical Borg. Trailing round the core of the Federation, they would encounter others, friends, people horribly suffering and maybe scavengers out for the kill!

I don't specifically see this as a 'Virus', more the Borg actually sitting in this large facility hacking the network. Any sites which go offline, they continue attacking, till they rejoin the comms collective, using their vast parallel processing function they use for bypassing every other piece of technology: Basically just how the collective operates normally, as a hugelly fast subspace comms relay. What's more, the Borg collective is a heck of a lot more 'real time' than the Federation.. they may begin upgrading the network, and assimilating the machinery at large facilities, using the replicators... Not actual people, because there are no drones to catch them hehe, but that would be a hell of a scary place to visit, let alone be trapped in!

Once the players, and with any luck hundreds of other ships figure out how to stop the Borg 'hacking' them, the Borg start to fight dirty, they 'adapt' Some crews may try and set up private networks between the ships they find, confident that their version of Lt. Data has made a foolproof firewall. So perhaps they have, or maybe the Borg instead of going for the all out 'shut down' upload actual 'viruses' which as you say may take on a life of their own.

Another horrific idea was what would happen if a Borg drone was so completely divested into a large computer (a galaxy class computer core or a large starbase) and then someone pulled the comms plug. The data left behind isn't just data, but is more like the conciousness of the drone, and like all drones, cut off from the collective, begins to remember it's former life. Imagine the horror and fear it would have at being a disembodied mind, with large chunks of it's memories missing, and people trying to kill it, maybe people it knew! a *ghost in the machine*.

Man this might make for quite a cool campaign setting!

[Tricky]

I think the outage/ server problems show the Borg have already assimilated out inter...........

I mean complaining is irrelevent. Server problems are irrelevent.

Your message board will be assimilated to service us......

[Cpt. Lundgren]

Borg? Sound Swedish

[Tobian]

Definitely not Swedish!

[C5]

Well, here is a lenghty answer I had been writing when the crash occurred and which I managed to save when the site kept babbling about a database error...
---

I very much love this idea of a Federation without any com system. Would be a nice "back to the dark ages" scenario.

For an even scarier idea, I'd see the Borg trying to reprogram every computer they could link to for one purpose : assimilation. Once a virus has infected the computer, every single system on board the starship is reprogramed to perform this task. Replicators start producing nanites (like the Earl Grey mentioned earlier). Some minor systems short circuit - thus causing the need to replicate new ones, which are, too, infused with nanites. And I won't start on what could happen in sickbay or in a holodeck (I even wonder if the transporter could be rigged to add nanites to anyone or anything who uses it)... Of course, the infection will also spread to planets, starbases and especially shipyards.
All of these nanites could stay dormant for a while, allowing the infected ships to spread the virus to any ship they open a comlink with. And then... they become active. Crewmembers start sprouting Borg implants, the ships suddenly stop responding and start to change... And of course, any ship answering the distress call from one of these stricken ships will become infected too.
This would make another nice zombie scenario, as crewmembers have to understand how ships become contaminated, then try to find out how the infection spreads and, finally, who is already infected. Imagine explaining to the captain that he's carrying nanites and it's only a matter of time before he turns into a full Borg drone... or worse, the only member of the crew who would be able to find a way to disable them.

Even if some crews manage to get rid of the infestation (which would imply a level of knowledge of Borg technology similar only to Voyager's), the Borg have taken control of enough communication hubs to keep spreading it... And of course, their computer virus keeps adapting, so any freed ship could become infected again by a mutated version of the virus.

After a while, the infected ships are assimilated enough to be able to complete the assimilation process and turn their former crewmembers to full fledged drones (at which point the assimilation could be considered irreversible).

A nice way to counter this could be to reverse engineer the virus, mask it as a new update (all infected systems are in constant communication for updating against new countermeasures), and spread it. Even though, this would be a very hard time for the Federation (and possibly any other empire they came in contact with), and lots of interesting action for the players, be it trying to help an infected ship, fighting an infection on their own ship, or fleeing through a slowly self assimilating Federation while shutting down any communication...

[The Tatterdemalion King]

I very much love this idea of a Federation without any com system. Would be a nice "back to the dark ages" scenario.

"...designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer system."

[JALU3]

So say . . . that it's spread through computers . . . however, the advance tech is still present . . . imagine what would have to happen if the Federation would have to operate in a world where they cannot be computer dependent . . . or atleast computers which communicate with otehr computers . . . otherwise the borg virus may continue to spread . . . like the problem that BSG had during the early episodes about having their technology work against them . . . what would a standard ship out there do . . . to be able to make it into an uninfected system.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Mentats.

[JALU3]

Mentats.

That's great . . . but those people are raised from a very early age to have that type of mental capability. But what of a ship out on the rim, say returning from a medium ranged (1-2 year) exploration mission, which is rimward. And find out from observations of the "silent" federation, scans of some effected ships . . . and warning bouys . . . what do they do as, as far they know, the last uneffective vessel in Starfleet.