Oh pooh! The Ecc couldn't have carried that episode (The Girl in the Fireplace) with the same panache. Ecclestone was good, Tennant was superb.
Guh. Probably walk around making rounded vowel sounds and terrifying tourists with your close-harmony singing. Bloody Welsh.
Hey Zak! ...What? That can't be right. They did? I missed like the 5th-8th. And the new git looks like an accident victim.
The problem with this statement is simple - how does a tank shell defend against microscopic nano-machines? Answer - it doesn't. It only takes one nanoprobe inside that shell, and it's game over. Consider, also, the Daleks have a total lack of anything that could be called tactics (beyond screaming EX-TER-MI-NATE and firing their gunsticks) and you have a recipe for OH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT BORG DOING... wait... WHAT? OH SHIT RUN!
Fighting the Time Lords >>>>> fighting the Borg. Hell, Phasers in Doctor Who have shown to be useless against Dalek shells, so Nanoprobes are too.
It would be the Daleks because they have a broader range of more powerful weapons. Star trek generally seeks to convince its target audience that the phenomena portrayed are feasible from an engineering point of view. The scientific inaccuracies and the scientific speculations are almost always conceived as something that the average nerd will believe might be possible at some point. Most of them are taken pretty much verbatim from hard scifi novels. This is very restrictive. Doctor who doesn't usually try to do that, and when they do their target audience is largely schoolchildren, and not even particularly nerdy schoolchildren. Therefore if the Doctor or one of the other characters needs to employ some tactic which is basically just flat-out magic, with the thinnest veneer of technology (seldom even science or engineering), they are free to do so. If they want a portable device that can destroy the planet, or the galaxy, they are well within their canon to produce it out of nowhere without any trouble at all. It's like 80% science 20% magic versus 5% science 2781.67% magic. (Magic can have any percentage it wants, because it's magic.)
The thing is, the Borg are one of those things in Star Trek that seem to operate on pure magic - shields that can overcome any amount of raw power thrown at them (example, the hyper-advanced Borg drone made when the Doctor's holoemitter and a set of Borg Nanoprobes combined was able to withstand the tremendous forces inside, iirc, what was essentially a dying star for considerable time, something that had moments before crushed an entire starship) being only one example of that.
Not so true -- throughout the film Enterprise - First Contact it's made very apparent how Borg shields work. Shields roughly work to counteract the frequency of weapons, the theory being if you can make them modulate at a frequency such that weapons fire energy + shield = 0 then the weapons are dissipated. Computer systems analyze weapons patterns to make predictive changes to shields to make 'learned shield patterns'. In the borg, that computer is the minds of hundreds of millions of people it's more effective, and the pattern of modulation can be inferred much earlier. Possible? Probably not. Magic? Nope.
Yes, but how do you account for the massive disparity we see in weapons energy over shield energy... unless the borg drones have immense reserves of power coming from somewhere to power said shield? Note - In this regard, I'm talking about the Borg Drone personal shields, not the ships shield. Ship shields... well, we know where that power comes from, cause damn the ships are big enough lol...
So why does crashing into them blow them up? Whatever the presumed reason, I still maintain that a space opera with hard sci-fi elements is more restrictive than a children's adventure story with elements of technomancy. In the doctor who universe, anything which amuses the imagination of a child is admissible. In the star trek universe you're restricted to plagiarism from scifi books and extrapolations of current technologies and theories. Example; a star trek ship generates a warped bubble of spacetime powered by a total conversion reaction of matter and antimatter. The tardis just goes wherever it will be needed later in the episode by cutting away to a graphic of a swirly tunnel through time, and is powered by the "heart of the tardis". In star trek they constantly worry about getting enough power, directing it where needed, diffusing incoming energy from enemy weapons, and so on. They're not real engineering challenges because it isn't real, but in the context of the show engineering is a constant issue for the characters. Quite often the victory comes from an engineering insight or superior intelligence collection methods. In doctor who, it almost never is. As long as the doctor can understand the enemy's emotional motive and formulate a morally acceptable plan, the required engineering will always be said to already exist. Quite often the victory relies on the faith of a teenage girl or the true meaning of christmas.
Crashing into... the borg drones? Presumably, Kinetic weapons work because, well, nobody really uses them, and most species foolish enough to engage in hand-to-hand combat get utterly thrashed (even Worf, with the strength of a Klingon, gets thrown around by them about half the time) And in Star Trek, they "bounce a tachyon particle beam off the main deflector dish" and make something impossible happen. Technobabble instead of pure-magic... but really, no discernible difference.
You wouldn't agree that the range of possibilities for plot devices in the doctor who universe is larger? How strange, I'd have thought it was obvious to anyone who has seen both. Still, that's what fiction is like, different people interpret it different ways.
Oh no, they are VERY different - just that they are both as equally "off the wall" as the other. Star Trek just veils it in pseudo-science, where as Dr. Who often makes it obvious that it's the "hopes and dreams of children" or some other such silly thing that caused the "good ending" to happen Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
