How come the Federation did not routinely use projectile weapons against the Borg?

Question

In "First Contact" Picard kills a couple of Borg drones in the Holodeck with a holographic Tommy gun. It would appear that while the Borg are able to adapt to become impervious to energy weapons, they are vulnerable to bullets. This looks like a gaping logical hole: why couldn't Star Fleet replicate "primitive" assault rifles to fight the Borg, if the knew that phasers were useless against them? Has this ever been addressed?

Answer 1

In-universe, I would think that the use of chemical explosives and kinetic energy weapons would be SEVERELY discouraged on any starship, given the chances of a hull breach, and the security forces we typically see would be mostly useless with such weaponry. They have been trained on energy weapons without recoil, with no significant magazine capacity, no need to reload, etc. It would be like taking a group of riflemen and giving them crossbows.

From a writing standpoint, there's just no way for the Borg to be a threat once the Federation begins using firearms instead of energy weapons. Kinetic energy isn't like the magic energy weapons they use - you can't just 'shield' against it (or else punches, swords, etc wouldn't work) and the relative simplicity of even modern firearms to mass-produce (given the established technology of the replicators) would quickly render Borg useless as face-to-face villians.

And CGI battles cost money.

In short: The Federation doesn't have the training to use them well, and would end up killing many of their own (if they even considered the possibility) by using them incorrectly, and if they ever did gain widespread use, the series would lose a major antagonist.

Answer 2

I think it's interesting that nobody else here has picked up on the inconsistent logic here. I would think the reason is precisely the one most people agree it is not - the shields will be adapted to block physical bullets. All the force fields in use in most places (including Federation ships - think of the brig) will be able to prevent physical things passing through. It isn't hard to imagine the Borg could simply adapt their shields against slower, larger bullets in addition to (or instead of) energy-based weaponry.

Answer 3

This has not been addressed, no.

Kill one Borg with a certain weapon and they will adapt. It's a bit surprising that they had never encountered any culture with projectile weapons, but since they now have, they would technically have adapted.

Of course, First Contact took place in the past and this knowledge never got back to the collective. So I guess the Federation is still good for one single Borg kill with bullets...

EDIT:

They don't seem to adapt to bat'leths very well...

Answer 4

It's a different universe, but there are parallels to the replicators in Stargate SG1 - they were also initially vulnerable to 'primitive' weapons (i.e. Earth technology) but immune to more sophisticated technology (Asgard, Goa'uld). However, they quickly adapt to the weapons, and so only a limited (given how quickly they can reproduce, basically unimportant) number can be destroyed in this way.

If this was addressed in Star Trek it seems likely that something similar would apply.

Answer 5

I think the reasoning of the writers would simply be that after that attack the borg would adapt and become invulnerable to holographic bullets. But you know, the writers aren't perfect.

Answer 6

Going from the other answers about needing a portable power source, I think the answer is a little simpler:

Phasers and energy weapons are energy!

Why not absorb part of it to generate the force field in the first place? That would explain why projectiles, bat'leths, and punches still work, and the drones wouldn't need a huge power source to keep using the force fields as they get fired at.

Answer 7

By the time of the episode on which a holodeck Moriarty becomes sentient, the series established that physical constructs on the holodeck are made of "holo-matter" (whatever that is). In the movie, "First Contact," we see the Borg's first encounter with bullets made of holo-matter.

So, even if the Borg had tuned their force fields to deflect objects made of ordinary matter, they might still have had to adapt to holo-matter projectiles.

Answer 8

They don't use projectile weapons because projectile weapons run out of ammunition.

Logically, shields can defend against projectiles; otherwise, the navigational deflector couldn't exist. Therefore, we must conclude that the Borg don't bother to defend against projectiles.

Why?

Because the replicator capacity of a Galaxy-class starship cannot produce enough ammunition to significantly reduce the Borg's numbers.

Resistance isn't futile because the Borg are invincible. It's futile because there are too darn many of them.

Answer 9

Perhaps the reason the Borg do not bother with kinetic shielding is more to do with medical technology. If your medical technology is so advanced that most non-catastrophic trauma can be repaired (for example, recall that Picard survives a knife through the heart!), projectile weapons become much less of a threat. Whilst it is possible to disable a drone with a projectile weapon, it would be quite easy to beam them back to the Cube for repair and regeneration, obviating the need for kinetic shielding. Of course in First Contact the Cube is gone, and this could explain the vulnerability of the Borg to the holographic tommygun.

Conversely, future energy weapons set to "kill" would presumably be designed to defeat the medical technology of the day by dealing some irreparable tissue damage, beyond ordinary trauma; this is usually depicted as vapourisation! This would necessitate the adaptive shielding technology to protect drones from energy weapons.

It may not be easy to implement a shield to protect from hand-to-hand weapons. Assuming that a viable kinetic shield technology exists, it is likely to be power-intensive, so given the limited energy storage capacity of individual drones, they will only want to activate it in the face of a genuine threat. When a small rigid object is approaching you at faster than the speed of sound it is almost certainly a threat, hence a shield could be configured to automatically activate in response to bullets. A much larger and relatively slower moving rigid object (such as a bat'leth) may be difficult to distinguish from the environment, however.

Answer 10

There are a ton of answers to this question already, but to me it seems like the answer hasnt really been hit upon yet.

First, maintaining kinetic shielding all the time would be expensive, from an energy perspective. Faced with a culture that has thus far used only energy weapons against them, it makes more sense for the Borg to choose defenses appropriate for the enemy they face. I have to think, though, that if projectile weapons started to become the primary mode of combat against the Borg in any one engagement, they would adapt to block bullets (holographic or otherwise) as well.

The primary objection I've seen here to this line of logic is this:

They don't seem to adapt to bat'leths very well...

But remember that the Borg's primary objective is not to kill, but to grow, to adapt. To "Add your technological and biological distinctiveness to [their] own". As such, their primary means of offense is to assimilate - and all examples of assimilation that I've seen from the Borg are from close range - hand to hand. Also note that all kinetic force shielding we've seen in the Star Trek universe is bidirectional - nothing in, nothing out. A drone, then, in close enough range to engage in hand to hand combat for the purposes of assimilation, would be forced to disengage any kinetic shielding to press his attack - thus rendering him vulnerable to punches, bat'leths, etc.

In short, the Borg would adapt to kinetic weapons with kinetic shielding in a prolonged engagement with a culture that made use of them, but would have to disengage this shielding at close range to assimilate any combatants.

Answer 11

I believe the TR-116 (the sniper rifle from DS9) was originally designed for fighting Borg.

Answer 12

There are two more things to consider that haven't been covered yet. One is that, in the holodeck a bullet fired from a holographic gun is neither solid nor does it have the signature of an energy weapon. Only when the projectile is about to interact with a real object (in this case the Borg drone) and the safeties are off will the holodeck replicate a real bullet with the required energy. So from one standpoint we can view any being in the holodeck as having hundreds or thousands of kinetic energy weapons aimed at them at all time in the form of holo-diode coupled replicators. It would likely be difficult to adapt to such a system, and also thus the big need for safeties to restrict such replication to prevent accidents.

The other thing to consider is that an energy shield can deflect a bullet, even a holographic one. Worf devised such a device using his communicator in A Fist Full of Datas. This may have been easier since Worf was more familiar with the technology, or due to the circumstances of the malfunction at the time, but it does suggest that eventually the Borg would have been able to adapt.