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By All Known Laws of Aviation... the Borg Cube!
Petrichor
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"By all known laws of aviation, a Borg cube should not be able to fly.
Its thrusters are too small to get its non-aerodynamic body off the ground.
The Borg cube, of course, flies anyway.
Because Borg do not care what other species think is impossible."
(get the reference?)
6
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(Someone else's planet, obviously.)
The Borg cube is probably the most logical starship design, since in space a ship doesn’t need to be aerodynamic
Although I think I read somewhere that a sphere is more efficient, but I like the cube. Spheres are curved and curves are a natural thing, I like the idea that there's something in the Borg collective psyche that just has to do everything in perfectly straight lines - like that's their ideology, even though they don't realise it about themselves, they're incapable of accepting that nature and emergent order from chaos has value, they have to do everything according to their 'pure order' philosophy (that's actually unworkable and destructive, because they think they're evolution but they're actually cancer).
Of course that means you can't have spheres, never mind 'tactical cubes' and scouts and whatever that ridiculous contraption was that the Queen rode around in, but whatever, never liked 'em anyway.
But no, obviously the Borg use Cubes and Spheres because they're the most efficient uses of area and volume, which are the most important priorities if you don't care to make it "look cool." A Borg cube can attack via any one of 6 sides, with 9 square kilometers of area per side. It can also fit the most amount of "stuff" inside the shape. It's kinda like how a minivan is more efficient at carrying people than a sports car.
Efficiency, symmetry, and redundancy. Boom. Borg.
EDIT: The real question you should be asking about the Borg is WHY BOTHER KEEPING ANY ORGANIC BODY PARTS? If the tech eye or arm or whatever is better, why wouldn't you replace them all? Why would anyone keep inferior biological components and their required support organs? Brain, sure. Heart and lungs to support it, okay, why not? The rest? No. (Obviously the answer is that this is a TV show with human actors. But the scary answer would be that the Borg "miss" their individuality.)
Do the borg want a ship that maximises the surface area to volume or minimises it? Surface area can be useful for interacting with the outside... Square or pyramid do this. Sphere if want to minimise surface area to volume, or contain volume within a smallest radius, optimise distance between all internal points, and likely most efficient for subspace bubbles etc. Sphere has lowest moment of inertia for turning, although given that they have artificial gravity = artificial inertia also (Einsteins strong equivalence principle). It could be that in the end the cube is best because it allows the most efficient use of replication, since it can be made entirely of smaller cubes, all subparts can be of a like physical construction, replaced in and out ... Spheres tend to have wasted space?
My biggest surprise with the cubes is that since I first saw the borg I expected the cube ships to fit together more, it seemed logical to me but was never used was it?
Jim
A Fusion Cube it was called. And it was a behemoth.
I saw this faction mission and wondered the same as many here; "It's in space - it doesn't matter what shape it is.".
But then I remembered that TNG episode where they discovered that the geometry of Starships nacelles was causing damage to space. I believe it's the reason why Voyagers nacelles move when the ship goes to warp speed - to overcome this problem.
So, it appears that the shape of a ship 'does' matter somewhat. After all, almost all warp capable ships we see have a main hull with warp nacelles (*in multiples of 2) protruding.
And although it's unrelated to the episode above, perhaps Federation scientists are puzzled at how a Cube can generate a stable warp field with it being such a peculiar design.
* - Yes, I know we do see ships with single nacelles, and even ships with 3 nacelles, but the vast majority we see have 2 - with leads me to think that it's the most practical of designs.
In short - let's give the writers of DB's faction missions some creative licence here. Besides, there's many things in canon Trek that don't makes sense or contradict each other. And if you don't like my explanation above - I look forward to hearing you ideas
The interstellar medium is estimated to be roughly 1 atom per cubic kilometre, but when travelling at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light, these atoms, molecules, dust motes, micro meteorites and other objects too small to be either detected or avoided can be exceedingly dangerous. Even a single atom, when impacting at 0.99C, could cause noticeable damage
It has been postulated that a needle shaped ship would be best suited to this situation with the pointed end facing in the direction of travel to minimize possible impacts. A Borg cube with huge flat surfaces would be a very impractical shape.
This said and done, we all know they have shields, deflectors, tractor beams and incredibly sophisticated sensors (as science fiction needs something to explain away such huge problems to interstellar travel)
Why replace organic parts? Are you kidding me? Think about everything we've invented to supplement our insufficient organic parts. If you could replace your eyes with cameras that could zoom 100x, see all the wavelengths of light, and in the dark, wouldn't you? There's absolutely nothing efficient about an organic body. Not even the rate at which we use energy. It's a product of evolution, not design. That's why a majority of "futurists" predict a biological/technological fusion.
Couple of things, sorry. It's actually 1 atom per cubic centimeter in interstellar space. Also the ships don't "technically" travel at .99c, or anywhere near it. They sidestep all relativistic/time dilation issues that would come with that. The cheat is that they enter "subspace" - which isn't a wormhole but it does shrink the distance between two points by whatever factor of "warp" they use. The physics are shady because it's obviously fictional, but warping space involves shrinking the space in front of you while expanding the space behind you.
But yes, all ships typically run "navigational deflectors" - although not Cochrane's Phoenix, which probably should have hit something and exploded
I admit, I went for Supremacy much more often in Civilization: Beyond Earth than I did Harmony or Purity.
IIRC, there is a Mod that allows eight Fusion Cubes to Fuze into an Omega Cube.......
I found the Armada III mod for SoSE too late.
I Modded the fire out of I and II. Loved that game. Got a DVD around here somewhere with the Mods I had dowbnloaed, still.d
Efficiency as in only replace what required to function. Why waste energy upgrading drones to do things not in their job description... As for the eye replacement, good luck trying to improve the functionality of the eye much with the space available. It works close to diffraction limited optics, at the most favourable wavelengths. Its low light power is exceptional, and the detection cells are wired into the nervous system in a far more efficient way for object recognition than the pixel arrays of digital cameras now ... Sure there may be some improvements possible but the only advantage I have found for other optic systems is by integrating them over large time periods (e.g. 1 minute exposures for city lights, 8 hours for Astronomy)
You are right about the warp avoiding collision issues, it stretches space/time so the two points nearly touch through an external dimension. The shrinking and expanding space you describe is more like an exotic form of standard propulsion that may avoid inertia issues in acceleration. Like timing paddling a kayak in waves to use their motion.
You are forgetting they have artificial gravity on the ships for impulse power. This is why they feel no acceleration that would crush the ships. Artificial gravity is manipulating mass and inertia, which could be applied to any dust and external matter in a collision, zero mass = zero force collision or deflecting. Actually this artificial gravity is the single hardest thing to explain in Star Trek from the physics I know... I wrote my thesis on the Strong Equivalence Principle.
My apologies, yes it seems the density of the interstellar medium has been revised heavily since my college days. Thanks for reminding me how long it's been and how old I am lol. While this is still only an estimate and can't be measured until we actually have a working interstellar craft (Voyager probes aside), it does strengthen my point.
As for warp speed, I was specifically referring to sub light, or impulse speed. Federation craft have full impulse at 0.25C according to cannon and Borg cubes (ST:TNG Q Who) apparently travel considerably faster at both warp and sub light speeds. Even at 0.25C the impact from an atom is considerable (a quarter of a big boom is still a big boom.) F=MA still shows a high energy impact where M is tiny but A is huge and 1 atom per cubic CM means a lot more booms than I previously suggested.
@Phantum:
I didn't specifically mention artificial gravity, correct, but my intention was that "without sci fi tech the shape of a space ship is important".
Anyone with good maths wanna figure the "G"s, based on say ten seconds to do the acceleration?
I am pointing more fingers at me than I am at you.
If we assume that the warp drive works like Alcubierre’s theorized FTL drive, then the ship and its occupants wouldn’t really be experiencing that much acceleration. I would be impressed even just by the acceleration from orbital velocities to full impulse...I really don’t want to do the math on that but I bet it is a lot of Gs.
[Editorial note: I read some of the garbage papers of exoplanets being published in Nature of all places.
My three-year-old could get published in Nature, it takes *Thomas Dolby voice* SCIENCE! to be published in a real journal like the ApJ.
Anyways, reading these pieces of drivel like this mass media report illustrated by this Google Doodle about OMG WE FOUND SEVEN EARTHLIKE EXOPLANETS I CANT CONTAIN MY HUMAN EXCRIMENT!
I guess no one knew how to read the actual paper cause when you do, those magical planets orbit so fast any inhabitants would get whiplash from the change of seasons. (Seriously, seasons would last a week)
And the report is not even appologetic of the concept, they made visualizations:
see here.
Look at those numbers. It doesnt make sense, but to*Thomas Dolby voice* SCIENCE!, it is "okay"]
Key missing data is mean surface temperature on a cloudy day. They are all right on top of the star........
That lovely picture shows 1g for Earth's gravity, so lazy.
Edit: Sadly a quick google search tells me that this lazy rounding up is also the popular way nowadays, even Wikipedia shows this.
So, wait. The baseline used for gravity is NOT Earth normal gravity?!?!?
1. The Earth's surface gravity is different all over the planet (at the poles you weigh more than at the equator).
2. Scientists like everything to fit together nicely, e.g. 1 litre of water weighs 10 Newtons under 1g of gravity, has a mass of 1kg and requires 1 joule of energy to move 1 metre (and so it goes on like this throughout the metric, or SI system).
Throwing in the number "9.81m/s/s" as the value of gravitational acceleration upsets these numbers by a tiny amount. But if you take 1g as "10 m/s/s" then scientists and mathematicians have their OCD satiated nicely and equations become much simpler.
Thus meaning that Earth's average surface gravity is slightly less than 1g and Kip Thorne's calculator doesn't explode.
Yeah I'm a nerd...