How long did it take for the Borg to reach the Alpha Quadrant? Was the entire journey made on transwarp? What was the relative speed metric of vessel sizes, speed e.g Transwarp, SlipStream and just Warp Drive?
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Technically a tachyon beam could be initiated in a particular region of space to open the conduit and providing that the vessel could survive the gravimetric distortion...you would need to project some sort of structural integrity ahead of the vessel to allow you to go into Mcdonalds for a Big Mac Meal and by pass the queue in HMV and back home before you get up.– user5124Commented Mar 3, 2012 at 18:54
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It depends on how often they had to stop for gas. That's petrol for you non-americans.– John OCommented Aug 9, 2012 at 18:12
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3 Answers
The Borg made transwarp gates, at least one in the Alpha Quadrant and one in the Delta (more are highly likely) that were used to jump from one to the other.
Here’s a description of Borg transwarp conduits from the forum thread The Borg's Super Speed!:
A transwarp conduit, also known as a transwarp corridor, was an artificially-created energy conduit through a realm of subspace known as transwarp space. They were utilized by the Borg to cover great distances in a relatively short period of time. Accessed via tachyon pulses of alternating frequencies, the conduits contained a matter stream in which a vessel could reach velocities at least twenty times greater than the maximum warp speed of a Galaxy-class starship, in a process Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge described as "like falling into a fast-moving river and being swept away by the current." (TNG: "Descent", VOY: "Dark Frontier", "Shattered")
This allowed the Borg to deploy vessels almost anywhere in the galaxy within minutes, giving them a decisive tactical advantage
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What about before the gates? They barely visited the Alpha quadrant due to the assumed fact of greate distances? The gates were going to change everything only at the last epsiode of Voyager.– jimjimCommented Aug 14, 2011 at 3:46
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3I am not sure but it would have to be some variant of the same (perhaps more resource intensive, based on the fact that only a few ships were sent at any given time) the trip from Borg space to the Federation in warp would be decades, but after Q let them know Humans were there it was only years. (And a few year in between attacks) So it would seem likely that it was a forerunner of the same technology. A slightly less likely answer, if you look closely and the vaguely plaid pattern on the side of Borg ships, they may have skipped light speed and went to 'ludicrous speed'. ;)– VaughnCommented Aug 14, 2011 at 11:21
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4So, the 70 year trip (for Voyager), likely ~60 at that point (due to Voyager finding shortcuts) is reducable to minutes by going 20x as fast? ST writers do math much?– JeffCommented Aug 14, 2011 at 18:59
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@Jeff "at least twenty times greater". Since tachyons are required to access it (tachyons cannot go slower than the speed of light), it could well be that 20x as fast as Warp 9.65ish is the minimum speed a Borg transwarp conduit can propel a ship.– IzkataCommented Mar 3, 2012 at 19:01
The speed of "normal" Transwarp is very limited. But after the assimilation of an species, who had another drive system called "quantum slipstream", both drive systems were integrated by the Borg and the new and improved Transwarp was incredibly faster.
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1I've never heard before that the Borg deployed anything similar to Slipstream.– BobbyCommented Aug 9, 2012 at 19:27
The timeline is not exact as I do not recall the exact dates.
In Enterprise researchers in the artic uncover a small group of borg who were from the movie First Contact. They had come from the future to try to stop humanity from inventing warp drive technology thereby eliminating the federation from history. In the Enterprise episode they ended uo sending a signal to the delta quandrant. However little was taken of notice because the signal would take five hundred years to reach the borg. In fact, the episode when Q reveals the borg is when the signal had just been recieved. It did not take long for the borg to make trip at all really. The only reason it was such a long gap was becuase the signal was too slow for galactic transmissions.
