Friendly reminder to all:

The republican/right wing party attempted to overthrow an election. And they are unabashed about that. And somehow they still have a 3rd of the country still supporting them.

Is that not enough for us to qualify as having a real fascism problem?

Gay - Anon was constantly terrified of shooters, which means they were constantly thinking of other men

Also a big fan of both series.

but if they have struggle dealing against a 2000 human civilization rebellion

There is a big caveat to this though, the combine are ridiculously pragmatic, to the point where they use humans to keep humans as slaves. Why specially create enforcers when there is already units that you can augment/brainwash into working for you, who already are well suited for the environment and atmosphere?

So that’s what the combine do, they use humans to keep other humans in check. So that revolt of 2000 humans was really only a revolt against other humans. Stories like that are a dime a dozen on earth.

The Combines dosen’t even have shields, the Combine Gunship can be throw away with just three real life rocket launcher and so far we see that’s one of their stronger airship synts units the combine have.

The shields one is a stronger argument, though again I think that might fall in line with the pragmatism of the combine. If all they are facing is humans, it could be the case in the eyes of the combine that putting extra defenses on your armored units is kind of pointless.

So they may very well have that tech, or something even more superior, but they just don’t bother wasting the resources on it.

Couple that with the fact that the gunships are themselves organic/enslaved, the combine probably don’t mind that the gunships are esentially cannon fodder. They might have the mindset that they can just breed up more.

But destroying a Borg cube? That is a feat even for an advanced civilization, or many of them.

The combine certainly are an advanced civilization. If you take the peripheral writings as cannon, they have at least one Dyson sphere. The tech for that might be beyond the borg, because even the borg’s biggest structures are grains of sand in comparison to the size of a dyson sphere.

Size doesn’t automatically mean a win, but the engineering required for a dyson sphere is huge. If they have that level of engineering, I could see them taking out pretty much as many cubes as they like. Especially if their dyson sphere(s?) are in any way weapons weaponized. And knowing the combine, they probably have sought such a weapon.

personally I think being a Stalker is worst than being assimilated by the Borg

Agreed 1000%. I’d rather be a borg than a half life stalker. If I’m going to have a hellish life with no agency and only pain, I’d rather not be conscious.

At the end of the day, the true strength of the borg is not particularly well defined (at least in my opinion), and thr true strength of the combine is even worse defined. The writers on either side have left too much up to question for any real definitive answer.

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who’s had thoughts about the borg origins.

She has been very persistent about knowing the background for everything. It bothers her to be dropped in the middle of something without the context.

So she wanted to start at the “very beginning”, which in my mind is TNG season 1. The original series is great, but I figured she’d enjoy it more after having already gotten into trek.

She is throughly enjoying the cheesy-ness of it though, which is really good.

I could see that too. Either way, it’s a fun thought experiment to question how such an entity comes into being. Because surely the starting point looked a lot different given that they’ve assimilated (and therefore been changed by) thousands of species.

I’m finally watching star trek with my girlfriend and getting her into it. Been watching along with her on TNG. So far we are about done with season 1, but I am big excited to re-watch DS9 se5, especially with her watching it for the first time by my side.

Gonna have to brave the awful ass se1 Sisko haircut though lol.

In my head cannon, that’s more or less how the borg started. I can see it starting off as a much more basic networked community that started off legitimately respecting people’s wishes to join/not to join. But over time it grew and changed, and become so invasive to the point they snowballed into the borg we know and love today.

And if we REALLY want to speculate, their first act of violence/force may have been against some entity that sought to attack them for being new and different. And whatever war or conflict that turned into ended up shifting the values of the borg such that forced assimilation was then seen as morally acceptable. And once that’s condoned, why stop?

That actually makes me think, would it theoretically be possible to automate ship repair with transporter technology? All the time they have ships coming in with giant chunks missing.

If you are able to get a high resolution scan of the current state of the vessel, and have the plans to build it, couldn’t they set up a specialized transporter to transport the damaged bits away, and transition area that is destroyed, and then replace it with new parts as needed?

Basically do some a similar repair method from Space Engineers, just fancier with transporters.

Just avoid areas with life signs. Person in the room? Delay the transporter sweep for an hour and check again. Or alternatively just don’t clear dead skin cells/hair/dust within a 2ft radius of a given life sign, and do maybe 3 sweeps a day.

Given that they have the ability to select pretty much whatever material they want with the transporters, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for them to do a once a day transport for all dust/debris particles directly into space, or some containment unit of their choosing. Same goes for pretty much any other cleaning task.

The air is plenty clean as it is

Tell that to the people in East Palestine Ohio. Tell that to the people that live near coal plants.

as long as you don’t live in California

Doesn’t matter where you live if the planet is uninhabitable.

Wanting to breath clean air on a habitable planet isn’t insanity.

I only live ~15 minutes from my parents. I just didn’t want to have to deal with going back and forth. Wasn’t worth it in the end.

This fundamentally and thoroughly explains what this Christmas has been like for me. Trying to move from one room to another has been a constant battle of stepping over things and pushing past clutter.

Sleeping on the couch of dog fur hasn’t been pleasant.

And the cherry on top has been my girlfriend having to go home because of her dog allergies. Hopefully next year will be better.

People are posting fan fiction of them together? That’s disgusting! Where? I need to make sure I avoid it.

Ah, I see. Imgur had it muted and I just didn’t realize.

The sound effect makes it way better