Post by Veeck on Jun 16, 2008 22:28:15 GMT -5
{name:Dmitri Nechayev#|#picture:21}
The Milky Way is lost. There is no longer any hope of a new superweapon, a new ally, or a new tactical doctrine saving the Milky Way Alliance from the Borg advance. Their numbers are too overwhelming, their technological advantage too great. The traditional responses to an overwhelming invader will not work in this case, either. The Borg are not vulnerable to a guerilla campaign, there is no hope of an outside ally to liberate us, no possibility of a peace treaty or a negotiated surrender on more favorable terms. So we must take the only option left, and flee the Milky Way with whatever refugee population we can rescue, to preserve some semblance of the genetic and cultural diversity of the Milky Way from the assimilating Borg onslaught.
A great arkship is under construction to escape the Milky Way with a cargo of over a million individual sentients, plus sufficient supplies and raw materials for the multi-century journey to the Andromeda Galaxy, to establish colonies which will hopefully form the nucleus of a reborn United Federation of Planets, as well as new homeworlds for its allies. The exodus to Andromeda will be lengthy, and will present some unique tactical problems.
* * *
The first and most obvious problem is that we are likely to be hunted by the Borg. While the Borg do not seem to seek revenge with any frequency, and have in the past not made especial efforts to round up every last member of assimilated species, with the survival of non-Borg civilization itself at stake, we cannot afford to assume that the Borg will simply let us go. The Borg are arrogant and self-confident to a ridiculous degree, but they are still entirely too logical and methodical to discount the possibility that refugees who successfully escape to other galaxies might one day return, perhaps with extragalactic allies in tow, to mount a re-invasion of the Milky Way.
Also, The Borg are also unlikely to simply stop their quest to assimilate all other life forms once they complete their absorption of the Milky Way, and will themselves surely eventually send out expeditionary forces to the Magellanic Clouds and even Andromeda. Refugees from their early conquests within the Milky Way have in the past carried word of the Borg advance to other species, and this early warning of their approach has allowed several non-Borg cultures, including our own, to mount a more effective defense. While this forewarning has not noticably slowed the Borg advance for long in the past, if any nearby galaxies have their own galaxy-wide polities, such an immense civilization may well be able to resist the Borg, given sufficient advanced warning. We can not assume the Borg will ignore this possibility.
Therefore, the utmost precautions are being taken to ensure that the Borg do not get wind of the Arkship Project. No individual with knowledge of the project is being allowed to approach to within 20 light-years of the known extent of the Borg advance. No information about the project is being sent by subspace; courier vessels carry all project commincations, and they have instructions to self-destruct rather than attempt to fight or even flee if they encounter Borg raiders. Individuals with knowledge of the project who must approach within 50 light-years of the front lines are given hypnotic suggestions to commit suicide rather than be captured and assimilated. Individuals with knowledge of the project who will not be making the crossing to Andromeda will have their memory wiped after we depart, or once their part in the project is completed, whichever comes first. Even those psychotechnicans who carry out the memory wipes will have their memory wiped, by a second set of psychotechnicians who believe they are part of a different project entirely.
Speaking of which, most of the materials, resources, and workers involved in the project believe they are supporting a project to build a new superweapon for use against the Borg, or are part of a whole variety of other cover-story projects aimed at fighting the Borg within the Milky Way, not escaping their advance entirely. Some of these cover stories are in fact true, although none of their projects are aimed at defeating the Borg outright, merely delaying their advance as long as possible, as that is all we can afford to hope for at this point. There is one notable exception: one of the cover stories is that a long-range attack fleet is being gathered, in order to launch a deep-penetration raid on the Borg homeworld, somewhere in the Delta Quadrant. Once there, they will attempt to do to the Borg what the Borg once tried to do to Earth, and travel back in time to defeat the Borg before they begin interstellar travel. However, as such a radical change to established timelines is certain to have wildly unpredictable consequences, the fleet that is in fact being gathered for this mission will not launch until after the Arkship has departed for Andromeda. For an example of one of the more likely consequences, consider that, without the well-demonstrated overwhelming threat of the Borg, it is unlikely that the UFP would have developed a pure warship type in the 2370's in order to fight them. Thus the Defiant-class vessels and the initial prototype for that class, the USS Defiant itself, would not have been around to play a key role in the ensuing Dominion War. For a more unlikely possibility, consider the chance that one of the many Delta Quadrant civilizations which were conquered decades or even centuries ago by the Borg may have, in the absence of the Borg, gone on to form an even greater threat to the rest of the Milky Way. For these and countless other reasons, both easily predictable and bizarrely unforseeable, we cannot afford to risk an alteration to the timeline on such a vast scale unless there truly is no other choice.
Once leaving the Milky Way, secrecy will be maintained by an advanced Cloaking Device fitted to the Arkship. The device in question is being supplied by the Romulan Star Empire, the very best that they have ever produced. The Arkship will travel under cloak at all times.
* * *
The second major tactical consideration is a consequence of the first. Because of the likelihood of Borg pursuit, and the extreme efforts being undertaken to prevent the Borg learning of the project, there is zero chance of getting reinforcements or resupply once we leave the Milky Way. There will be no other refugee vessels escaping to rendezvous with the Arkship, no visiting remaining friendly worlds on the edge of the galaxy that have not yet fallen to the Borg to pick up additional supplies or refugees. Any other refugee ships detected in intergalactic space will be avoided, even at the cost of detours that add years to the journey to Andromeda.
Few ships could make the journey to Andromeda at all. Even at maximum warp, it will take over a millennium and a half to travel the 2.5 million light-years to reach Andromeda. There is only one type of ship capable of making such a lengthy and arduous journey, and make it without stopping to refuel, resupply, or rearm. And that is a Generation ship, one the size of a small moon, with sufficiently large energy reserves to simply replicate any materials or parts as needed. The distant descendants of the original crew will reach Andromeda to set up colonies. Obviously, there will be significant psycho-social issues to be solved, but they are beyond the scope of this report. From a purely tactical and strategic viewpoint, it will be vital to maintain military and technical training of each generation of crew, because we cannot know if the Borg will find us, or when or where an encounter may happen. They may find and attack us shortly after launch, while we are still inside the Milky Way...or not until we're deep in intergalactic space, halfway to Andromeda...or not until the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy itself, when no one on the ship has fought in a real battle for fifteen centuries. In fact, if they attack us anywhere near Andromeda, it would be strongly advised that we turn and head for another galaxy entirely, such as Triangulum or the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular. But regardless of when we fight, or who we fight, whether the Borg chasing us or unfriendly inhabitants of Andromeda seeking to keep us out, we have no hope of resupply or reinforcement. Survival of the arkship is of paramount importance, it is not an expendable asset.
Therefore, there are two fundamental tactical considerations. The first is that, whenever possible, the Arkship will seek to avoid combat, and flee rather than fight. An advanced model of Romulan-supplied cloaking device will aid in this goal. Cloakable parasite warships which can scout around the Arkship's path of travel and help it avoid contact will also be of some help, although they may paradoxically make it easier for the Borg to find the Arkship, giving them more targets to find, and thus more chances to find them. Finally, the extreme range inherent in the Arkship design will allow it to make long detours around possible Borg encounters, or to take a non-direct route to Andromeda. For example, we will not be heading directly towards Andromeda upon leaving our construction site in the Badlands Nebula. Rather, we will head at an oblique angle out of the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, breaking for the emptiness of intergalactic space immediately, rather than traveling through the disk of our galaxy on a more direct route to Andromeda.
The second fundamental consideration is that, as we cannot be sure we can always avoid contact with the Borg, nor can we be sure what sort of reception we may receive from Andromeda natives upon reaching our destination, the Arkship, despite not being fundamentally a warship, will be very heavily armed indeed. In addition to powerful Species 8472 Plasma cannons capable of destroying an entire M-class planet, we will have a wide variety of weapons supplied by the various races and political entities taking part in the project. Klingon disruptors, Romulan Plasma Torpedoes, Hydran Fusion Cannons and Hellbores, phasers, photon torpedoes, drones, missiles, fighters, parasite warships up to and including dreadnought-class warships from several militaries, particle beams and even a few reverse-engineered Borg weapons. In addition to dedicated weapons mounts, most of the surface area of the Arkship planetoid will be covered with open-frame holo-replicator arrays capable of creating replicated armor plating, shield emitters, warp nacelles, sensor arrays, or weapons mounts of a wide variety of types and classes. Damaged armor plating or weapons and sensor mounts will be able to be replaced almost instantly, granting the Arkship an almost Borg-like ability to self-repair and adapt to new tactics, technologies, and unforseen situations. The fact that most of the interior is filled with holodeck emitters (to provide planet-like living accomodations for refugees, and thus better preserve their planet-based cultural traditions) means that, in the event that we are boarded by Borg drones, we can summon up an almost unlimited army of holo-simulated marines to repel such boarders, create illusory labrynthes of maze-like corridors to prevent boarders from reaching vital areas, and even encase boarders in holo-replicated solid rock. This Arkship will therefore not only be the largest moving manufactured object in the history of a hundred sentient races, it will be the most powerful warship in recorded history. And it needs to be, to ensure the survival of Milky Way Civilizations.
****
The Third major tactical consideration is the nature of our enemy. The Borg are easily the most frightening enemy any of the member races of the Milky Way Alliance have ever faced. They are clever, adaptable, logical, and highly technologically advanced. They are a very difficult enemy to fight and defeat in battle.
The Borg have four major strengths that must be overcome if we are to defeat them and escape.
First, they have assimilated thousands of sentient races, either entirely or partially, and absorbed their technological catalog, their historical experience, and their cultural and genetic traits. The Borg can thus, as the situation seems to call for it, be as logical as a Vulcan, as fearless as a Klingon, as devious as a Romulan, as adaptable as a Human, or as strategically brilliant as a Zakdorn. They hold in their collective memory all the accumulated experience of several million years of historical development in weaponry and tactics, and can call upon this at will. Whatever tactical gambit, strategic brilliance, or ruse of combat an enemy comes up with, chances are, the Borg or one of their assimilated races has seen it employed before...seen it used, seen it countered, seen it succeed and fail in a hundred different ways. Much of their vaunted ability to “adapt” is nothing more than an immense race-memory of past successes and failures, thousands of arms races between weapons and armor, between sensors and countermeasures, between tactics and technology. They remember better than the best non-Borg student of history every battle, every war, every campaign and skirmish, gone down every technological and tactical pathway, every developmental blind alley and every school of strategic thought.
However, this very adaptabilty may be an achilles heel. If we carefully choose the order in which we deploy various dissimilar weapons and shield technologies against them, we may be able to force them into a predictable cycle of adaptation. We may be able to trick them into adapting to one attack method in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the next scheduled attack method. By alternating between energy-beam-based attacks and physical-projectile-based attacks, we may be able to force them to modify their shielding against one weapons system in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the next.
Second, Their ships are capable of almost instantaneous self-repair using nanobots, and thus anything which does not destroy a Borg ship outright is almost useless. This ability also lets them modify their ships in mid-battle, constructing and installing new weapons mounts, new shield emitters, new sensors and countermeasures to block any beam or projectile they have seen and defeated before, to pierce any armor or defense they have seen and defeated before, to see through any cloaking device or cloud of jamming they have seen and defeated before.
However, this is a strength we may be able to duplicate. The open-frame holo-replicator arrays on the outer surface of the Arkship, and the holo-replicator arrays within it, have been designed to do much the same thing, albeit using holo-replicator technology rather than pure nanotechnology. We doubt the Borg will travel down this particular path of technological development, as they have no need of the recreational or training-based uses for holodeck technology that led us to our present high state of holodeck development. This particular offshoot of holodeck technology has not, to our knowledge, been seen by the Borg in combat use, and thus they may not have had a chance to adapt to it yet.
Third, the Borg collective allows them to network together billions of cyber-organic minds to simultaneously work on a problem with levels of cooperation and synergy otherwise unobtainable. It also allows them to instantly transmit information to whatever members of the collective have need of it at the moment. For example, if any Borg vessel encounters a particular tactic or technology, even if that particular ship is destroyed in the encounter, all other Borg instantly learn of it, and can begin planning a counter-tactic or technological countermeasure to ensure they are not defeated by it the next time they encounter it again. This is the other half of their so-called “adaptability”. Whereas, if a Federation starship falls to a new weapon, information on exactly how that ship was defeated may be lost if there was not time to launch a message buoy or send a subspace message to Starfleet Command describing the encounter, the Borg do not normally find themselves in such a situation. So even weapons and tactics that are momentarily useful against them are quickly adapted to, and that information instantly sent to all Borg ships everywhere. And whereas, even if a Federation ship in such an encounter does manage to get word back of what killed it, it will take months or years to come up with a workable countermeasure, design it into a new generation of starship, build such starships in useful quantities, and deploy them to the front, the Borg can use their collective consciousness to quickly come up with a countermeasure, send the information out to all pre-existing Borg warships, and near-instantly upgrade them to take this new countermeasure into account.
However, this too may be a strength that we can duplicate, if not on quite the same scale. The Arkship's holo-replicator-based architecture also lends itself to customization on the fly, and it's central computer consciousness is sophisticated enough to rapidly implement any new countermeasures which its crew can come up with. Having no distant central authority to report back to, solutions that the crew of the Arkship come up with need go no further than the Arkship itself, they can rapidly be implemented in what is, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of Starfleet. Also, one of the several secret technologies which are under development to fight the Borg, but which will not be available in sufficient numbers in enough time to stop their advance, and thus is being reserved for the Arkship project exclusively, is a system of subspace jammers intended to block the signals of the Borg collective consciousness on a local scale. These jammers, if placed between two Borg vessels, should completely block collective information transfers between them. Deployed in combat within the Milky Way, they may be useless, as the Borg could simply re-route around the jammers unless they were deployed in a complete sphere around a given Borg target. However, once we are well on our way to Andromeda, the fact that the rest of the Borg are behind us in the Milky Way simplifies the jamming problem immensely. Some of our parasite warships will thus trail behind the Arkship, carrying these jammers, forming a two-dimensional planar grid of jammers on a wide enough scale to block any borg collective transmissions to a large volume of space centered on the Arkship. Any Borg ship approaching close enough to engage the Arkship in combat will be quickly surrounded on several sides by parasite warships which stay out of Borg weapons range, but carry jammers to block transmissions back to the Milky Way, or at oblique angles to possible relay ships at an oblique angle to the Milky Way. This should ensure that any Borg encountered cannot report back on our existence, let alone our (hopefully) successful countermeasures to the Borg strengths.
Fourth, the Borg exist in overwhelming numbers. While the Arkship may be starting to sound like the perfect anti-Borg weapon, it does have a serious drawback. Even the entire Milky Way Alliance does not have the resources to build more than one such vessel in the time we have before the Borg overwhelm the Alpha and Beta quadrants. And if we had built the Arkship as a pure warship and sent it into battle, it would be, despite its size and power, quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, if nothing else. The Arkship can certainly handle one or two cubes...perhaps a dozen or more of them. It cannot handle a thousand. And once the Borg destroyed it and analyzed the leftover wreckage. This final Borg strength cannot be overcome, and it is the reason we have chosen to build the Arkship in the first place.
The Arkship Project: Tactical and Strategic Considerations
A Report to the Arkship Project Committee
(Executive Summary)
By
Commander Dmitri Nechayev
United Federation of Planets
Starfleet Command
A Report to the Arkship Project Committee
(Executive Summary)
By
Commander Dmitri Nechayev
United Federation of Planets
Starfleet Command
The Milky Way is lost. There is no longer any hope of a new superweapon, a new ally, or a new tactical doctrine saving the Milky Way Alliance from the Borg advance. Their numbers are too overwhelming, their technological advantage too great. The traditional responses to an overwhelming invader will not work in this case, either. The Borg are not vulnerable to a guerilla campaign, there is no hope of an outside ally to liberate us, no possibility of a peace treaty or a negotiated surrender on more favorable terms. So we must take the only option left, and flee the Milky Way with whatever refugee population we can rescue, to preserve some semblance of the genetic and cultural diversity of the Milky Way from the assimilating Borg onslaught.
A great arkship is under construction to escape the Milky Way with a cargo of over a million individual sentients, plus sufficient supplies and raw materials for the multi-century journey to the Andromeda Galaxy, to establish colonies which will hopefully form the nucleus of a reborn United Federation of Planets, as well as new homeworlds for its allies. The exodus to Andromeda will be lengthy, and will present some unique tactical problems.
* * *
The first and most obvious problem is that we are likely to be hunted by the Borg. While the Borg do not seem to seek revenge with any frequency, and have in the past not made especial efforts to round up every last member of assimilated species, with the survival of non-Borg civilization itself at stake, we cannot afford to assume that the Borg will simply let us go. The Borg are arrogant and self-confident to a ridiculous degree, but they are still entirely too logical and methodical to discount the possibility that refugees who successfully escape to other galaxies might one day return, perhaps with extragalactic allies in tow, to mount a re-invasion of the Milky Way.
Also, The Borg are also unlikely to simply stop their quest to assimilate all other life forms once they complete their absorption of the Milky Way, and will themselves surely eventually send out expeditionary forces to the Magellanic Clouds and even Andromeda. Refugees from their early conquests within the Milky Way have in the past carried word of the Borg advance to other species, and this early warning of their approach has allowed several non-Borg cultures, including our own, to mount a more effective defense. While this forewarning has not noticably slowed the Borg advance for long in the past, if any nearby galaxies have their own galaxy-wide polities, such an immense civilization may well be able to resist the Borg, given sufficient advanced warning. We can not assume the Borg will ignore this possibility.
Therefore, the utmost precautions are being taken to ensure that the Borg do not get wind of the Arkship Project. No individual with knowledge of the project is being allowed to approach to within 20 light-years of the known extent of the Borg advance. No information about the project is being sent by subspace; courier vessels carry all project commincations, and they have instructions to self-destruct rather than attempt to fight or even flee if they encounter Borg raiders. Individuals with knowledge of the project who must approach within 50 light-years of the front lines are given hypnotic suggestions to commit suicide rather than be captured and assimilated. Individuals with knowledge of the project who will not be making the crossing to Andromeda will have their memory wiped after we depart, or once their part in the project is completed, whichever comes first. Even those psychotechnicans who carry out the memory wipes will have their memory wiped, by a second set of psychotechnicians who believe they are part of a different project entirely.
Speaking of which, most of the materials, resources, and workers involved in the project believe they are supporting a project to build a new superweapon for use against the Borg, or are part of a whole variety of other cover-story projects aimed at fighting the Borg within the Milky Way, not escaping their advance entirely. Some of these cover stories are in fact true, although none of their projects are aimed at defeating the Borg outright, merely delaying their advance as long as possible, as that is all we can afford to hope for at this point. There is one notable exception: one of the cover stories is that a long-range attack fleet is being gathered, in order to launch a deep-penetration raid on the Borg homeworld, somewhere in the Delta Quadrant. Once there, they will attempt to do to the Borg what the Borg once tried to do to Earth, and travel back in time to defeat the Borg before they begin interstellar travel. However, as such a radical change to established timelines is certain to have wildly unpredictable consequences, the fleet that is in fact being gathered for this mission will not launch until after the Arkship has departed for Andromeda. For an example of one of the more likely consequences, consider that, without the well-demonstrated overwhelming threat of the Borg, it is unlikely that the UFP would have developed a pure warship type in the 2370's in order to fight them. Thus the Defiant-class vessels and the initial prototype for that class, the USS Defiant itself, would not have been around to play a key role in the ensuing Dominion War. For a more unlikely possibility, consider the chance that one of the many Delta Quadrant civilizations which were conquered decades or even centuries ago by the Borg may have, in the absence of the Borg, gone on to form an even greater threat to the rest of the Milky Way. For these and countless other reasons, both easily predictable and bizarrely unforseeable, we cannot afford to risk an alteration to the timeline on such a vast scale unless there truly is no other choice.
Once leaving the Milky Way, secrecy will be maintained by an advanced Cloaking Device fitted to the Arkship. The device in question is being supplied by the Romulan Star Empire, the very best that they have ever produced. The Arkship will travel under cloak at all times.
* * *
The second major tactical consideration is a consequence of the first. Because of the likelihood of Borg pursuit, and the extreme efforts being undertaken to prevent the Borg learning of the project, there is zero chance of getting reinforcements or resupply once we leave the Milky Way. There will be no other refugee vessels escaping to rendezvous with the Arkship, no visiting remaining friendly worlds on the edge of the galaxy that have not yet fallen to the Borg to pick up additional supplies or refugees. Any other refugee ships detected in intergalactic space will be avoided, even at the cost of detours that add years to the journey to Andromeda.
Few ships could make the journey to Andromeda at all. Even at maximum warp, it will take over a millennium and a half to travel the 2.5 million light-years to reach Andromeda. There is only one type of ship capable of making such a lengthy and arduous journey, and make it without stopping to refuel, resupply, or rearm. And that is a Generation ship, one the size of a small moon, with sufficiently large energy reserves to simply replicate any materials or parts as needed. The distant descendants of the original crew will reach Andromeda to set up colonies. Obviously, there will be significant psycho-social issues to be solved, but they are beyond the scope of this report. From a purely tactical and strategic viewpoint, it will be vital to maintain military and technical training of each generation of crew, because we cannot know if the Borg will find us, or when or where an encounter may happen. They may find and attack us shortly after launch, while we are still inside the Milky Way...or not until we're deep in intergalactic space, halfway to Andromeda...or not until the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy itself, when no one on the ship has fought in a real battle for fifteen centuries. In fact, if they attack us anywhere near Andromeda, it would be strongly advised that we turn and head for another galaxy entirely, such as Triangulum or the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular. But regardless of when we fight, or who we fight, whether the Borg chasing us or unfriendly inhabitants of Andromeda seeking to keep us out, we have no hope of resupply or reinforcement. Survival of the arkship is of paramount importance, it is not an expendable asset.
Therefore, there are two fundamental tactical considerations. The first is that, whenever possible, the Arkship will seek to avoid combat, and flee rather than fight. An advanced model of Romulan-supplied cloaking device will aid in this goal. Cloakable parasite warships which can scout around the Arkship's path of travel and help it avoid contact will also be of some help, although they may paradoxically make it easier for the Borg to find the Arkship, giving them more targets to find, and thus more chances to find them. Finally, the extreme range inherent in the Arkship design will allow it to make long detours around possible Borg encounters, or to take a non-direct route to Andromeda. For example, we will not be heading directly towards Andromeda upon leaving our construction site in the Badlands Nebula. Rather, we will head at an oblique angle out of the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, breaking for the emptiness of intergalactic space immediately, rather than traveling through the disk of our galaxy on a more direct route to Andromeda.
The second fundamental consideration is that, as we cannot be sure we can always avoid contact with the Borg, nor can we be sure what sort of reception we may receive from Andromeda natives upon reaching our destination, the Arkship, despite not being fundamentally a warship, will be very heavily armed indeed. In addition to powerful Species 8472 Plasma cannons capable of destroying an entire M-class planet, we will have a wide variety of weapons supplied by the various races and political entities taking part in the project. Klingon disruptors, Romulan Plasma Torpedoes, Hydran Fusion Cannons and Hellbores, phasers, photon torpedoes, drones, missiles, fighters, parasite warships up to and including dreadnought-class warships from several militaries, particle beams and even a few reverse-engineered Borg weapons. In addition to dedicated weapons mounts, most of the surface area of the Arkship planetoid will be covered with open-frame holo-replicator arrays capable of creating replicated armor plating, shield emitters, warp nacelles, sensor arrays, or weapons mounts of a wide variety of types and classes. Damaged armor plating or weapons and sensor mounts will be able to be replaced almost instantly, granting the Arkship an almost Borg-like ability to self-repair and adapt to new tactics, technologies, and unforseen situations. The fact that most of the interior is filled with holodeck emitters (to provide planet-like living accomodations for refugees, and thus better preserve their planet-based cultural traditions) means that, in the event that we are boarded by Borg drones, we can summon up an almost unlimited army of holo-simulated marines to repel such boarders, create illusory labrynthes of maze-like corridors to prevent boarders from reaching vital areas, and even encase boarders in holo-replicated solid rock. This Arkship will therefore not only be the largest moving manufactured object in the history of a hundred sentient races, it will be the most powerful warship in recorded history. And it needs to be, to ensure the survival of Milky Way Civilizations.
****
The Third major tactical consideration is the nature of our enemy. The Borg are easily the most frightening enemy any of the member races of the Milky Way Alliance have ever faced. They are clever, adaptable, logical, and highly technologically advanced. They are a very difficult enemy to fight and defeat in battle.
The Borg have four major strengths that must be overcome if we are to defeat them and escape.
First, they have assimilated thousands of sentient races, either entirely or partially, and absorbed their technological catalog, their historical experience, and their cultural and genetic traits. The Borg can thus, as the situation seems to call for it, be as logical as a Vulcan, as fearless as a Klingon, as devious as a Romulan, as adaptable as a Human, or as strategically brilliant as a Zakdorn. They hold in their collective memory all the accumulated experience of several million years of historical development in weaponry and tactics, and can call upon this at will. Whatever tactical gambit, strategic brilliance, or ruse of combat an enemy comes up with, chances are, the Borg or one of their assimilated races has seen it employed before...seen it used, seen it countered, seen it succeed and fail in a hundred different ways. Much of their vaunted ability to “adapt” is nothing more than an immense race-memory of past successes and failures, thousands of arms races between weapons and armor, between sensors and countermeasures, between tactics and technology. They remember better than the best non-Borg student of history every battle, every war, every campaign and skirmish, gone down every technological and tactical pathway, every developmental blind alley and every school of strategic thought.
However, this very adaptabilty may be an achilles heel. If we carefully choose the order in which we deploy various dissimilar weapons and shield technologies against them, we may be able to force them into a predictable cycle of adaptation. We may be able to trick them into adapting to one attack method in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the next scheduled attack method. By alternating between energy-beam-based attacks and physical-projectile-based attacks, we may be able to force them to modify their shielding against one weapons system in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the next.
Second, Their ships are capable of almost instantaneous self-repair using nanobots, and thus anything which does not destroy a Borg ship outright is almost useless. This ability also lets them modify their ships in mid-battle, constructing and installing new weapons mounts, new shield emitters, new sensors and countermeasures to block any beam or projectile they have seen and defeated before, to pierce any armor or defense they have seen and defeated before, to see through any cloaking device or cloud of jamming they have seen and defeated before.
However, this is a strength we may be able to duplicate. The open-frame holo-replicator arrays on the outer surface of the Arkship, and the holo-replicator arrays within it, have been designed to do much the same thing, albeit using holo-replicator technology rather than pure nanotechnology. We doubt the Borg will travel down this particular path of technological development, as they have no need of the recreational or training-based uses for holodeck technology that led us to our present high state of holodeck development. This particular offshoot of holodeck technology has not, to our knowledge, been seen by the Borg in combat use, and thus they may not have had a chance to adapt to it yet.
Third, the Borg collective allows them to network together billions of cyber-organic minds to simultaneously work on a problem with levels of cooperation and synergy otherwise unobtainable. It also allows them to instantly transmit information to whatever members of the collective have need of it at the moment. For example, if any Borg vessel encounters a particular tactic or technology, even if that particular ship is destroyed in the encounter, all other Borg instantly learn of it, and can begin planning a counter-tactic or technological countermeasure to ensure they are not defeated by it the next time they encounter it again. This is the other half of their so-called “adaptability”. Whereas, if a Federation starship falls to a new weapon, information on exactly how that ship was defeated may be lost if there was not time to launch a message buoy or send a subspace message to Starfleet Command describing the encounter, the Borg do not normally find themselves in such a situation. So even weapons and tactics that are momentarily useful against them are quickly adapted to, and that information instantly sent to all Borg ships everywhere. And whereas, even if a Federation ship in such an encounter does manage to get word back of what killed it, it will take months or years to come up with a workable countermeasure, design it into a new generation of starship, build such starships in useful quantities, and deploy them to the front, the Borg can use their collective consciousness to quickly come up with a countermeasure, send the information out to all pre-existing Borg warships, and near-instantly upgrade them to take this new countermeasure into account.
However, this too may be a strength that we can duplicate, if not on quite the same scale. The Arkship's holo-replicator-based architecture also lends itself to customization on the fly, and it's central computer consciousness is sophisticated enough to rapidly implement any new countermeasures which its crew can come up with. Having no distant central authority to report back to, solutions that the crew of the Arkship come up with need go no further than the Arkship itself, they can rapidly be implemented in what is, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of Starfleet. Also, one of the several secret technologies which are under development to fight the Borg, but which will not be available in sufficient numbers in enough time to stop their advance, and thus is being reserved for the Arkship project exclusively, is a system of subspace jammers intended to block the signals of the Borg collective consciousness on a local scale. These jammers, if placed between two Borg vessels, should completely block collective information transfers between them. Deployed in combat within the Milky Way, they may be useless, as the Borg could simply re-route around the jammers unless they were deployed in a complete sphere around a given Borg target. However, once we are well on our way to Andromeda, the fact that the rest of the Borg are behind us in the Milky Way simplifies the jamming problem immensely. Some of our parasite warships will thus trail behind the Arkship, carrying these jammers, forming a two-dimensional planar grid of jammers on a wide enough scale to block any borg collective transmissions to a large volume of space centered on the Arkship. Any Borg ship approaching close enough to engage the Arkship in combat will be quickly surrounded on several sides by parasite warships which stay out of Borg weapons range, but carry jammers to block transmissions back to the Milky Way, or at oblique angles to possible relay ships at an oblique angle to the Milky Way. This should ensure that any Borg encountered cannot report back on our existence, let alone our (hopefully) successful countermeasures to the Borg strengths.
Fourth, the Borg exist in overwhelming numbers. While the Arkship may be starting to sound like the perfect anti-Borg weapon, it does have a serious drawback. Even the entire Milky Way Alliance does not have the resources to build more than one such vessel in the time we have before the Borg overwhelm the Alpha and Beta quadrants. And if we had built the Arkship as a pure warship and sent it into battle, it would be, despite its size and power, quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, if nothing else. The Arkship can certainly handle one or two cubes...perhaps a dozen or more of them. It cannot handle a thousand. And once the Borg destroyed it and analyzed the leftover wreckage. This final Borg strength cannot be overcome, and it is the reason we have chosen to build the Arkship in the first place.