Okay, so why did Voyager keep so many spare Borg alcoves?

[conuly]

I mean, sure it comes in handy every time a random ex-Borg or future Borg or whatever shows up and "looks helpless", but isn't that just like tempting fate?

Comments

[dogstar]

I think it's kind of like feeding feral cats. You start just putting out the bowl JUST IN CASE and WHOOSH all of a sudden you are up to your ears in unpleasant critters.

[conuly]

Actually, all their later borg were quite friendly and personable. It's just 7....

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well, what were they gonna do, just throw them out the air-lock? Voyager is a damn long way from home, in unknown territory, with limited resources - but with plenty of space for cargo - so I should think they probably keep everything.

Humans are hoarders anyway: "This might come in handy someday" - "Maybe we could use the parts" - "It still works fine, there's nothing wrong with it" - "It's probably valuable; perhaps we could trade it for something we need" - "Be a shame to waste it" - heh, you know the drill. A lot of people can't bring themselves to throw away a worn-out pair of socks, a dress they know they'll never fit into again, or a box of mildewed comic books, let alone a fully-operational hunk of arcane alien technology.

And you know if they DID throw it away, they'd need it within a week, and be going "OMG, I knew we should have kept that", but all in vain... because that's how it works, isn't it?

Fate doesn't need to be tempted. Fate is always hungry. That goes double for fictional characters, because "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after" makes for a really boring story. So if Voyager's crew didn't keep the spare Borg alcoves, the script-writers would've made them live to regret that decision, just because they could.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

And assuming they ever get back to Federation Space (which they obviously hoped to do) then I would bet they would eagerly be taken to pieces by the Federation's scientists/engineers and studied for any possible information/advantage they could glean from it.

[conuly]

Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

And in the meantime, it's a scrapheap for random junk that might be useful in patching up the ship - or even random elements that might be extracted. They're a long way from home and this is sophisticated technology (of their enemies) which could be used to Heath Robinson some system or other. It could come in handy as the ship falls more and more apart. It went a long way between services!

(We're reaching this stage at my work right now. The building's ten years old, as it most of the kit in it, and so everything is dying all at once. Now imagine that you're thousands of lightyears away from home with no-one to call on for spare parts and you can understand what our engineers must have to go through why Voyager might hang onto anything vaguely useful looking.)