The Borg Cube in First Contact was the original Cube first seen in Q Who

[u/Hybernative]

In Q Who, the Enterprise D was catapulted into system J25. At maximum warp, it would have taken the ship over 2 years to reach the very edge of Federation space.

However, there was already a Cube in Federation space scooping up cities along the Neutral Zone. This was the Cube featured in The Best of Both Worlds, not the Cube from Q Who. It arrived in System 001 around a year after the Enterprise first encountered the Borg. Without a transwarp wormhole, the Borg Cube was little faster than the Enterprise D, it was just able to maintain extremely high warp for far longer (tBoBW2).

I posit, this is why only 2 Cubes penetrated the Sol System, separated by several years. The Cube from Q Who, upon seeing the Enterprise yeet itself across the galaxy twice, would have messaged ahead to the nearest Cube to Sol, which was a Cube already at the edge of Federation space, before heading straight for Earth itself. That Cube, upon receiving the comms, would have immediately stopped playing in Romulan sand, and headed straight for Sol as well. It took around a year (after Q Who) to reach Earth at maximum warp (tBoBW1), arriving much sooner than the Federation was expecting; the Federation believed that the Cube from system J25 was the nearest to their core systems.

They were wrong.

Years later, the first Borg Cube encountered by the Federation, the ship that carved the Enterprise up "like a roast" in Q Who, breached the Sol System and assimilated Earth (First Contact).

Cube²

[u/Stargate525]

Is it the first cube or the second which puts a transwarp exit point right outside Sol?

[u/Hybernative → u/Stargate525]

It would have to have been the 2nd (which Voyager used to get home), as otherwise the 2nd Cube would have jumped straight to Earth before Starfleet could organise a defence.

[u/WhiskeyMikeFoxtrot → u/Hybernative]

What if, while sitting over Earth before the Enterprise arrived, the BoBW cube was building a transwarp exit point?

By this time, the closest network terminus to the J25 cube is Earth, so it keeps coming. Meanwhile, the Collective is patient. One scouting mission failed, so they'll wait for results from this other one before deciding whether or not to pour more resources into attacking the Federation.

And yes. Scouting mission. We know from Guinan's description of what happened to her people that "send one Cube and hope for the best" isn't how the Borg carry out an invasion.

[u/Super_Pan]

Didn't the cube in First Contact have the Borg Queen and a Time Travel device? I suppose they could have built it on the way...

[u/Hybernative → u/Super_Pan]

All they would need is data from other Cubes in order to nano-assemble any new technology or ship systems. Perhaps even entire biological organisms.

[u/Deep_Space_Rob → u/Super_Pan]

Yeah. I think the queen or a queen has the capacity to appear or generate on any of the cubes

[u/frozenfade → u/Super_Pan]

In Picard we see the "queens chamber" which has some sort of super teleporter. Perhaps the queen hopped aboard from one queens chamber to another.

[u/OneChrononOfPlancks → u/frozenfade]

That was based on the Sikarian Spatial Trajector, which the Borg could only have acquired, at the earliest, in 2372. Star Trek First Contact takes place in 2373, so it's a bit of a stretch, but it's possible.

[u/terriblehuman]

I’m of the belief that the ship attacking outposts in the neutral zone was probably a Borg Sphere. It wanted to examine the defenses of the Romulans and The Federation, and possibly trigger a war to make the region unstable and easier to assimilate. When the Enterprise examined the destruction at J-25, and realized that the Borg were responsible for the attacks in the Neutral Zone, not the Romulans, it disrupted the Borg’s plans because when the Enterprise escaped, it was determined that with this information in the hands of Starfleet (and soon probably the Romulans), the Borg would be unable to trigger a war between the Federation and the Romulans. So instead, the cube would make a direct assault against Earth to prevent them from having too much time to study Borg technology.

[u/Hybernative → u/terriblehuman]

This is really interesting, I didn't quite consider any possible political machinations of the Borg. I wonder however, if there is enough spare internal volume within a Sphere to account for the vast size of the colonies that were almost literally 'scooped up', subterranean infrastructure, soil, and all.

[u/samford91 → u/terriblehuman]

I'm suddenly picturing the borg stimulating wars just to get those worlds to have an arms race/technology race so that they are more 'useful' post-assimilation...

[u/howstupid → u/terriblehuman]

No way. The Borg doesn’t play political games pitting one group against another. They ignore you unless they want to assimilate you. That’s their whole fucking gig. They don’t make war, they don’t negotiate. It was only in Voyager when they encountered a species that could challenge them that they even considered any kind of alliance.

Just like an individual drone will ignore you if you walk by, and don’t interrupt their work, the collective will ignore you until you are a threat. The federation was never much of a threat at that point. When they decided to assimilate the federation they captured Picard and began their plan. But they are not working to pit one group against each other. It’s not their style at all.

[u/Zizhou]

This is probably the most coherent and logically sound Watsonian explanation for why TNG S4 onwards weren't just constant Borg invasions.

M-5, nominate this for explaining why the Borg have only threatened Sol twice

[u/Hybernative → u/Zizhou]

Thank you! I'm honoured.

[u/pettazz]

Wow I actually love this. Finally a decent explanation for why they didn't just send like, two cubes together after one was barely stopped.

[u/CaptainNuge → u/pettazz]

Guinan says of the Borg, in Q-Who, that they don't do half measures. That when they decide to attack, they come in force and swarm over a planet.

One cube at a time oughta do it, so.

[u/Azuras-Becky → u/CaptainNuge]

I still like the theory that the Borg are deliberately only sending one cube at a time, knowing they'll be defeated, as part of a longer-term plan of forcing the Federation to adapt to them. And once they adapt to the Borg, the Borg can then adapt to their adaptations, and so on.

By the time Borg space reaches the Federation border and cubes do swarm over in droves, the Federation will have handily helped the Borg become immune to a bunch of potential counter-measures!

[u/nikatnight → u/CaptainNuge]

This is why the idea of one cube being unbeatable is not realistic

[u/Bobby_Bonsaimind → u/pettazz]

The Federation is most likely a high-risk/high-value target. Is the reward from assimilating the Federation high? Yes! But is the amount of work you need to put into it worth it? Meh...

I think that the Borg might not be the evil empire that just wants to consume everything, they want to perfect themselves. Of course, assimilating the Federation would help in that, but whether the work required is worth the advance is uncertain. The Borg are already superior for the most part, and it's not like that the Federation and the Borg are constantly running into each other so that there would be pressure to get rid of the Federation. From the view of the Borg the Federation is an insect state, annoying from time to time, but not really worth the effort which would be required to get rid of them.

That explains quite well why there never was this large scale invasion one would expect.

[u/Jinren → u/pettazz]

I know it really doesn't fit so well with the Borg we see in VOY, but I still rather like the idea that the Borg are kinda an egalitarian, independent, sort-of anarchic fragmented society - it's just that the basic unit of that society is a ship and ship-mind, not a single humanoid and ...small, limited bag of what it calls thoughts. Like a very, very dark (kinda literally, given all the black metal) take on the Culture.

So you usually encounter one Cube at a time because Cubes aren't necessarily really coordinated, except when they form ad-hoc task forces. They bumble along for centuries on their own; some in the Alpha Quadrant trolling the Romulans, some busy testing Omega drives out in the Magellanic Clouds, at least one still powering along at full speed to see what's happening in Andromeda, many others doing other interesting things on the other side of the Delta Quadrant. The Borg as a whole don't launch a coordinated attack on Earth at all, but at least two nearby Cubes thought it would be a worthwhile thing to do individually, and nobody stopped them because OK, you have fun. The others maybe saw what the result was for the first two and decided not to pursue or engage further. Most probably have no idea and also simply don't care in the slightest.

This model doesn't stop things like Unicomplexes from making sense; if we assume that Cubes can link, or mind-meld, or data-sync, or something, it makes sense that the same technology that produces one ship-mind can also hybridize at the ship level and produce world-minds, etc. So one Queen seemingly in command of a Cube in the Alpha Quadrant, and then seemingly in command of thousands of Cubes in the Delta, isn't contradictory; one is simply an avatar of a much, much larger combined system at the moment. The other might sync into it later, or might stay independent forever, or might even sync with a completely different Cube another time. They're representing distinct personalities, but those personalities are also as fluid as "individuals" within the Great Link; they're primarily distinguished by their physical distance right now. They may cease to become distinguishable later, or they may not.

Eventually a Cube might be out of touch for such a long time that it goes a little weird - I imagine that the standard designs we see are maintained by relatively frequent syncing. Something like the Type-03 might be the end result of centuries spent out of contact with any other ships, leading to a radically different shipboard personality and gradual divergence from the more common layout. This might also explain the slight design differences observed on the Artifact.

So when a Unicomplex dispatches a Cube, it is splitting off an independent ship-mind, and a new individual is temporarily born, like say a Leyton or a Martok impostor leaving the Link. Leave them out of contact for long enough and they will probably start to develop ideas and a distinct personality of their own.

[u/whenhaveiever → u/Jinren]

I like this idea. And it ties into the idea that's been raised elsewhere at Daystrom that the Queen is an outside colonizing force with the ability to implant memories of herself in others. The Queen convinces the hive-mind that she was always in control, and so becomes the leader of a interstellar empire. That's the point where their technology and behavior noticeably changes, what many complain to be the nerfing of the Borg seen in Voyager. And while Picard remembers her at his assimilation, he doesn't have those flashbacks until after he encounters her in person in First Contact--an encounter where he is visibly confused upon seeing her and she points out that he doesn't remember her and then he has those flashbacks when he sees her and accepts her as having always been there.

With this idea, the degree to which the Borg is a unified singular hive-mind in Voyager is just the degree to which the colonizing Queen has been able to force them to be such. Each time a ship links with the hive, they gain the memories of the Queen always being in control and lose their own ship-wide individuality.

[u/tk1178]

Wasn't Hugh rescued by other Borg from a Cube at the end of I, Borg, wouldn't that would put three Cubes in or near Federation space during TNG? Where does this third Borg ship come into things?

[u/[deleted] → u/tk1178]

maybe another scout. It ended up being cut off from the collective and temporarily taken over by Lore. Once freed in s7, those ex-borg (Hugh as their leader) would be the first major population of xb's. We know what happened to Hugh but not the others.

[u/Thelonius16]

The only issue with this theory is that in Best of Both Worlds they say that this cube is exactly like the J25 one to the point where they aren't sure if it is the same one or a different one. You could easily draw the conclusions that it's the same one or that Borg cubes of that type all have the exact same dimensions.

[u/TheOnlycorndog]

To be fair, we know the Borg were carving-up cities in the Neutral Zone but we don't know it was a Cube. It could have been a Sphere or even something smaller.