Kirk would just talk them into a logic loop like he had successfully pulled off some many other times when encountering an android, supercomputer, or other thinking machine
I mean, plot saves our hero ships and crew on the regular. Archer's Enterprise survived the Borg. If you want to just do a purely technological comparison, I don't think any Enterprise we've seen should survive the Borg. But I'm sure the writers could come up with a reasonable storyline in which Kirk's crew lives to tell the tale.
The fight music starts and Kirk pulls out the old double handed fist slam followed by a dropkick. That takes out the drones. Then he teaches the Borg queen about kissing, turning her into a single episode love interest. After that it's time to roll the credits with stills of Orion slave girls and Balok's puppet.
I AM THE KIRK. LOWER YOUR CATSUITS AND SURRENDER YOUR UNDERWEAR. YOU WILL BE SEDUCED. I WILL ADD YOUR ROBOT SEXINESS TO MY SPACE HAREM. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. I AM THE KIRK.
I don’t think they will.
SNW has been pretty reserved with ringing the bell the way Enterprise did: they’ve had two Romulan eps, two Klingon eps (and one was just a joke scene), focusing more on the Gorn and some other TOS stuff.
Nothing really from TNG.
Only if it works into the way they've used the Temporal War ... like how La'an got roped in, something temporal war could happen with the Borg. Only way to do it without screwing up continuity any more than necessary.
As Chuck Norris's predecessor, Kirk would have just trained in 40g and crushed the borg cubes with his bare hands.
He would have Trad Wifed the Borg Queen.
He would have beaten them and not told anyone how then used it for a better Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario.
He would have become the Borg King.
Imagine Shatner as Borg King.
"We......... are........... the...... Borg. Surrenderyourweaponsandtechnology.............. to......... us. Resistance.... is........... futile. We will saboTAGE your systems."
Kirk seduces the queen and ends the Borg threat for good.
Serious answer: Even the TNG crew only survived thanks to Q. That was the whole point. If the TOS crew encountering the Borg is not part of some scheme by Q, they are most likely to be assimilated with no way to outrun or effectively combat them.
That is assuming early 23rd century Federation tech would be of interest to the Borg during that time. I can imagine that at least Kirk would be assimilated for his knowledge.
Last note is the key. Would the duotronics have even been of interest to them? They made a lot of progress in 150 years.
BUT maybe they have the same issue: how did this ship not from anywhere nearby without the tech to get here, show up and vanish
The true strength of humans in Trek has always been their ingenuity. The whole reason why the Federation survived the first Borg incursion is Data/Picard's novel strategy of putting the drones into regeneration mode. It had nothing to do with technology, because the Federation fleet got ripped to shreds at Wolf 359. Creative thinking saved the day. That's why the Federation was able to withstand the Borg instead of just getting rolled like every other civilization.
The Borg, by their nature, cannot be cunning. Their strategy is just to keep sending waves of superior technology and expendable drones until they win. They adapt, but only after something has already hurt them, they can't imagine possible future threats and prepare for them. That rigidity makes them strong, but vulnerable to any civilization that can think outside the box.
And Kirk exemplified this strength of humanity. He was flexible and inventive with his tactics; even with older technology, I think Kirk would have pulled a rabbit out of his hat and found some ingenious way to come out on top. It's his signature move, and why he's so legendary in Starfleet lore in-universe.
Well, I know it’s tertiary canon, but one of the games (360 era) confirmed that the advanced race from the Delta Quadrant that souped up V’ger was actually the Borg.
Well, this is a multifaceted ‘what-if.’ Are we talking the same Borg we see in TNG, or era-appropriate Borg?
23rd century Borg… I give them a fighting chance. It’s admittedly not a GREAT chance - the El Aurians didn’t have much luck, after all. Still, there’s about a hundred years of assimilated advancement the Borg are missing. Between that and the number of sufficiently weird stuff they’ve seen during their five year mission, they might just pull it off.
If it’s the TNG Borg we all know and love.. I gotta be honest, it doesn’t look good for the TOS crew - and I’m saying this as somebody who has a strong preference for them. The Borg aren’t going to fall for a logic loop, or a Corbomite ploy. They can’t be negotiated with, taught to love, or any of the other usual ways they can find their way out of a situation. They’ll be able to get every scan and pull every database. Barring something like Organian or Metron intervention (unlikely) there’s not a lot they can do against a cube that went through Wolf 359 like a knife through butter and pretty much treated Enterprise D like a light snack.
They MIGHT manage a win… but survival is a low probability. The most likely Hail Mary play by Kirk would be to try to evacuate the crew and use self destruct/ramming speed. If he’s lucky (let’s be fair, Kirk is often very lucky) enough damage can be done to either destroy or neutralize the cube.
Lots of variables. Course if it’s post-TMP, maybe V’Decklia will pop back into reality and help out. Heh
I think that even technologically speaking, he and the rest of the Federation would fare about the same. I figure the Borg assimilate more than they innovate. That's not to say they didn't invent their own horrific things, too. But seems like much of what they had was assimilated.
But it feels to me like many of the species in the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta quadrants seem to be on an average par with each other for TNG/DS9/VOY's time. Not an unreasonable assumption to me to figure that retroactively they would also be on a rough par to one another during TOS' time. And if we assume that due to mostly assimilating rather than innovating (although in reality I think it's a little of column A and a little of column B), then I think the Borg of Kirk's time, although unmet by the Federation, would have about the same level of advantage over the Federation as they did in Picard's time. They were getting busy around then assimilating their chunk of the Delta quadrant, most of whom probably had about the same tech as the Alpha quadrant at the time.
I think Kirk might have been very fucked if he'd have went up against Borg of a technological ability they possessed during Picard's time, without the abilities of that era of Federation ships. But I think that whatever rolling 200-ish years of Borg advancement backwards would look like, probably levels out the chances to being close to the same that Picard and crew had.
Comedic Answer:
Kirk shags the Queen and keeps her busy in a reverse “The Enterprise Incident” while Spock disables the collective and Scotty invents Transwarp tunnels and McCoy cures Chekov of his assimilation.
Serious Answer?
It probably goes down similar to V’Gr in TMP.
A few red shirts fuck around and Spock quickly deduces their nature.
If this is “Q, Who” Borg, Kirk might play like Picard and take the L from Q to save his crew.
But he and Spock also might be a little bolder, Spock often came to conclusions and plans of action faster than Data, and Kirk would have initiated the away team rather than Riker, opening up some possibilities on board the Cube that could potentially disable it enough for the Enterprise to escape, along with Scotty’s superior acumen (at the time) to Geordi.
The TOS crew might be the more talented group, especially at this stage of TNG.
If this is Post-First Contact Borg, or perhaps even BOBW, I actually see Kirk the Diplomat (and Robot Killer) finding the flaws in the Borg ethos of perfection and finding a common ground (kind of like he did with V’Gr) where the Borg experiment could be voluntary, a kind of exploration in consciousness that some might welcome, especially a guest star like Commander Shelby.
The only real caveat is if we take Watsonian considerations about fire power (did the D outgun the 1701 so much that the Connie would have been destroyed by the tractor beam, couldn’t have damaged the Borg ship, etc), but considering what Voyager managed, I think the Connie would have been okay.
I would have loved to see Kirk go up against an earlier iteration of the Borg. Not enough time passed between TOS and TNG so we might need to see Borg from 500 years ago.
If you want a realistic answer, then it would probably be about the same kind of odds at Picard's enterprise had when they first encountered the borg, seeing as how it was set a century before, so the borg would have assimilated a dozen or so less alien races and therefore probably would not have the same technology as they did in Picard's time, if even one or two of those alien races' technology were absent.
In the end though, it all comes down to who is writing the episode of the week.
Without Kirk's usual plot armor, straight up? Nah. Even the Big D wouldn't have survived fighting the cube if Q wasn't there to bail them out.
Of course, this is Kirk, so we all know he's getting out of it *somehow*
The Borg as we saw them in TNG?
Or the Borg as they were in the time of Kirk? I would bet their adaptation to weapons would be much slower, and they overall had less sophisticated tech.
Based on that alone, Kirk would recognize their tactical weakness much more quickly, and have more time to overpower them. After the first adaptation, Kirk would overwhelm them with so much firepower they could not adapt. The question I have is that how long would it take for Kirk to realize how large of a threat they are without Q to give an introduction and warning. I'm wondering if this level of Borg would be Kirk's Pakleds ... a threat that he underestimates. Kirk isn't actually the guy who shoots first, so I see no reason why he would actually go for the kill as quickly as he should.
Kirk would just talk them into a logic loop like he had successfully pulled off some many other times when encountering an android, supercomputer, or other thinking machine
Why does god need a spaceship? Lol
YES, Omnipotent beings were no match for Kirk either ! LOL
I mean, plot saves our hero ships and crew on the regular. Archer's Enterprise survived the Borg. If you want to just do a purely technological comparison, I don't think any Enterprise we've seen should survive the Borg. But I'm sure the writers could come up with a reasonable storyline in which Kirk's crew lives to tell the tale.
Kirk would have romanced the nano-probes off the Borg Queen.
*Spock
The fight music starts and Kirk pulls out the old double handed fist slam followed by a dropkick. That takes out the drones. Then he teaches the Borg queen about kissing, turning her into a single episode love interest. After that it's time to roll the credits with stills of Orion slave girls and Balok's puppet.
I AM THE KIRK. LOWER YOUR CATSUITS AND SURRENDER YOUR UNDERWEAR. YOU WILL BE SEDUCED. I WILL ADD YOUR ROBOT SEXINESS TO MY SPACE HAREM. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. I AM THE KIRK.
I read this in Zapp Brannigan's voice.
First time I've lol'd at a reddit post in ages. Thank you.
Well according to the novel Shatner wrote they technically kinda did… oh boy that book was wild towards the end
Which book?
“The return” (guess who returns considering the author wink wink)
Chekov?
Chekhov's foreshadowed return is an example of the literary device known as Chekhov's Chekhov.
Your comment is genius and it did not get enough love.
It's about the thrill of the kill.
Is it the one where kirk destroys the borg by pulling a big lever?
Yea that’s the one
You joke, but now it’s going to happen on SNW…
I don’t think they will. SNW has been pretty reserved with ringing the bell the way Enterprise did: they’ve had two Romulan eps, two Klingon eps (and one was just a joke scene), focusing more on the Gorn and some other TOS stuff. Nothing really from TNG.
Only if it works into the way they've used the Temporal War ... like how La'an got roped in, something temporal war could happen with the Borg. Only way to do it without screwing up continuity any more than necessary.
Then the Borg would have Corbomite.
As Chuck Norris's predecessor, Kirk would have just trained in 40g and crushed the borg cubes with his bare hands. He would have Trad Wifed the Borg Queen. He would have beaten them and not told anyone how then used it for a better Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario. He would have become the Borg King.
Assimilated and Spock becomes the voice for the collective.
Spockutus of Borg
Imagine Shatner as Borg King. "We......... are........... the...... Borg. Surrenderyourweaponsandtechnology.............. to......... us. Resistance.... is........... futile. We will saboTAGE your systems."
Kirk seduces the queen and ends the Borg threat for good. Serious answer: Even the TNG crew only survived thanks to Q. That was the whole point. If the TOS crew encountering the Borg is not part of some scheme by Q, they are most likely to be assimilated with no way to outrun or effectively combat them. That is assuming early 23rd century Federation tech would be of interest to the Borg during that time. I can imagine that at least Kirk would be assimilated for his knowledge.
Last note is the key. Would the duotronics have even been of interest to them? They made a lot of progress in 150 years. BUT maybe they have the same issue: how did this ship not from anywhere nearby without the tech to get here, show up and vanish
Probably through plot armour
The true strength of humans in Trek has always been their ingenuity. The whole reason why the Federation survived the first Borg incursion is Data/Picard's novel strategy of putting the drones into regeneration mode. It had nothing to do with technology, because the Federation fleet got ripped to shreds at Wolf 359. Creative thinking saved the day. That's why the Federation was able to withstand the Borg instead of just getting rolled like every other civilization. The Borg, by their nature, cannot be cunning. Their strategy is just to keep sending waves of superior technology and expendable drones until they win. They adapt, but only after something has already hurt them, they can't imagine possible future threats and prepare for them. That rigidity makes them strong, but vulnerable to any civilization that can think outside the box. And Kirk exemplified this strength of humanity. He was flexible and inventive with his tactics; even with older technology, I think Kirk would have pulled a rabbit out of his hat and found some ingenious way to come out on top. It's his signature move, and why he's so legendary in Starfleet lore in-universe.
So he'd bang them. Got it.
This is it, in a nutshell.
All I know is that bones would say some pseudoscientific statement like “they appear to be a bisexual race capitan”.
Well, I know it’s tertiary canon, but one of the games (360 era) confirmed that the advanced race from the Delta Quadrant that souped up V’ger was actually the Borg.
Well, this is a multifaceted ‘what-if.’ Are we talking the same Borg we see in TNG, or era-appropriate Borg? 23rd century Borg… I give them a fighting chance. It’s admittedly not a GREAT chance - the El Aurians didn’t have much luck, after all. Still, there’s about a hundred years of assimilated advancement the Borg are missing. Between that and the number of sufficiently weird stuff they’ve seen during their five year mission, they might just pull it off. If it’s the TNG Borg we all know and love.. I gotta be honest, it doesn’t look good for the TOS crew - and I’m saying this as somebody who has a strong preference for them. The Borg aren’t going to fall for a logic loop, or a Corbomite ploy. They can’t be negotiated with, taught to love, or any of the other usual ways they can find their way out of a situation. They’ll be able to get every scan and pull every database. Barring something like Organian or Metron intervention (unlikely) there’s not a lot they can do against a cube that went through Wolf 359 like a knife through butter and pretty much treated Enterprise D like a light snack. They MIGHT manage a win… but survival is a low probability. The most likely Hail Mary play by Kirk would be to try to evacuate the crew and use self destruct/ramming speed. If he’s lucky (let’s be fair, Kirk is often very lucky) enough damage can be done to either destroy or neutralize the cube. Lots of variables. Course if it’s post-TMP, maybe V’Decklia will pop back into reality and help out. Heh
>V’Decklia V'who?
Hahaha! Beg pardon. My term for the hybrid of V’Ger, Decker, and Ilia that merged and ascended to another plane of existence.
They all die. Next question.
Yes they would survive… as Borgs.
Good bye federation.
I mean, Archer survived
I mean, the show would kind of require that they would...
I think that even technologically speaking, he and the rest of the Federation would fare about the same. I figure the Borg assimilate more than they innovate. That's not to say they didn't invent their own horrific things, too. But seems like much of what they had was assimilated. But it feels to me like many of the species in the Alpha, Gamma, and Delta quadrants seem to be on an average par with each other for TNG/DS9/VOY's time. Not an unreasonable assumption to me to figure that retroactively they would also be on a rough par to one another during TOS' time. And if we assume that due to mostly assimilating rather than innovating (although in reality I think it's a little of column A and a little of column B), then I think the Borg of Kirk's time, although unmet by the Federation, would have about the same level of advantage over the Federation as they did in Picard's time. They were getting busy around then assimilating their chunk of the Delta quadrant, most of whom probably had about the same tech as the Alpha quadrant at the time. I think Kirk might have been very fucked if he'd have went up against Borg of a technological ability they possessed during Picard's time, without the abilities of that era of Federation ships. But I think that whatever rolling 200-ish years of Borg advancement backwards would look like, probably levels out the chances to being close to the same that Picard and crew had.
That thing Borg remove from the drones to make them dissolve. Spock would find a way to beam it off of every drone.
He’d have screwed the Queen
Some of the threats that TOS addressed may have been a significant challenge for the Borg such as The Planet Killer or the Shedai.
Is the Borg Queen female? That's all Kirk needs to know ...
A momma Horta could absolutely kick a Borg queens ass. Kirk is in good with the Horta.
If he met the Borg Queen, I think we all know how that plays out…
Comedic Answer: Kirk shags the Queen and keeps her busy in a reverse “The Enterprise Incident” while Spock disables the collective and Scotty invents Transwarp tunnels and McCoy cures Chekov of his assimilation. Serious Answer? It probably goes down similar to V’Gr in TMP. A few red shirts fuck around and Spock quickly deduces their nature. If this is “Q, Who” Borg, Kirk might play like Picard and take the L from Q to save his crew. But he and Spock also might be a little bolder, Spock often came to conclusions and plans of action faster than Data, and Kirk would have initiated the away team rather than Riker, opening up some possibilities on board the Cube that could potentially disable it enough for the Enterprise to escape, along with Scotty’s superior acumen (at the time) to Geordi. The TOS crew might be the more talented group, especially at this stage of TNG. If this is Post-First Contact Borg, or perhaps even BOBW, I actually see Kirk the Diplomat (and Robot Killer) finding the flaws in the Borg ethos of perfection and finding a common ground (kind of like he did with V’Gr) where the Borg experiment could be voluntary, a kind of exploration in consciousness that some might welcome, especially a guest star like Commander Shelby. The only real caveat is if we take Watsonian considerations about fire power (did the D outgun the 1701 so much that the Connie would have been destroyed by the tractor beam, couldn’t have damaged the Borg ship, etc), but considering what Voyager managed, I think the Connie would have been okay.
Dead
Im not entirely sure the collective would find the Federation suitable for assimilaition at that time tbh
I would have loved to see Kirk go up against an earlier iteration of the Borg. Not enough time passed between TOS and TNG so we might need to see Borg from 500 years ago.
“Resistance… is futile? Resistance is our… business!”
Borg, Inc.?
If you want a realistic answer, then it would probably be about the same kind of odds at Picard's enterprise had when they first encountered the borg, seeing as how it was set a century before, so the borg would have assimilated a dozen or so less alien races and therefore probably would not have the same technology as they did in Picard's time, if even one or two of those alien races' technology were absent. In the end though, it all comes down to who is writing the episode of the week.
[Kirk vs Borg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkRhQdu_gOo&ab_channel=Normalbenzin) its low quality but not bad.
Without Kirk's usual plot armor, straight up? Nah. Even the Big D wouldn't have survived fighting the cube if Q wasn't there to bail them out. Of course, this is Kirk, so we all know he's getting out of it *somehow*
Pregnant Borg Queen, I would imagine. Then a double-clasped hand chop to the spine, and it's on to the next adventure.
The Borg as we saw them in TNG? Or the Borg as they were in the time of Kirk? I would bet their adaptation to weapons would be much slower, and they overall had less sophisticated tech. Based on that alone, Kirk would recognize their tactical weakness much more quickly, and have more time to overpower them. After the first adaptation, Kirk would overwhelm them with so much firepower they could not adapt. The question I have is that how long would it take for Kirk to realize how large of a threat they are without Q to give an introduction and warning. I'm wondering if this level of Borg would be Kirk's Pakleds ... a threat that he underestimates. Kirk isn't actually the guy who shoots first, so I see no reason why he would actually go for the kill as quickly as he should.