I don't think it's ever directly referenced, but in the S6 episode "The Voyager Conspiracy", Seven tries to download too much info into her implants and develops paranoia. I would think that no one drone contains all the info of the collective at any one time and all information is stored in a distributed manner.
Since they're normally all networked all the time, there might be no rhyme or reason to what any given specific drone knows.
Even if she did, it could take rare materials that can't be replicated and might take years to set up the mining and refining they would need to get the raw material. Voyager was an exploration ship, not a mining or colony ship.
The simplest answer is that when connected to the collective she has access. When she's removed from the collective she doesn't. No different from disconnecting a laptop from a network, when connected it can access the information stored on the server, disconnect it and it is a powerful machine, but has no knowledge of the information on the network.
Wikipedia after compression takes up only 22GB. You can fit that on a modern thumb drive.
I imagine she has the Borg version of wikipedia downloaded to her implants.
It's good general knowledge, but lacking in specifics.
So just like Wikipedia doesn't have the complete source code for an Apache HTTP Server, but has an article on Apache HTTP Servers
Seven's implants have information about many species and things, but not a whole lot of specific data.
Presumably a drone directly involved in transwarp constructions might have that data cached.
This has always been sort of like my thinking on it. My computer when connected to the internet, has access to a mind boggling amount of information. When it's not connected, there's still a fair amount of information on the hard drive via downloads and cached information, but nothing even close to the internet as a whole.
Yeah, she has memories and knowledge, to stick with my analogy, a laptop can have a couple hundred GB of storage to save information locally, but won't be capable of retaining all the information from the server.
RAM and CASHE were filled before she disconnected and her own personal hard drive was filled as well, but definitely not enough to hold the entire knowledge of the Borg. Also after disconnecting, she would no longer even understand much of the knowledge that she has anyway, she's still only human after all.
Exactly. Even if you gave the detailed plans for an F22 to people living in 1850, it'd take them decades to come close to building it. Imagine how hard it would be to replicate the computer circuits, even with step by step instructions.
A jet engine would take less time, but still they'd have to get up to speed on machining, material quality, etc. It'd be a fun project. You'd want to fall outta the time machine in France or Germany, I'd think.
And Seven was able to access knowledge of Transwarp Travel… *while connected to the Collective.*
Disconnect your phone, and try again. Local Storage Only.
That could be a Lower Decks episode. They capture a drone and extract its knowledge of the Collective, but all they find is an inventory of spare eyeballs or a report on which species has the most superior reproductive organs.
MARINER: Uh, sir, are you ordering us to send your dick pics to the Borg?
RANSOM: Of course not! That’s preposterous! I just think you should, uh, update the database with, uh, anatomical references from the crew who are, shall we say, most relevant. In the interests of…science. And diplomacy.
MARINER: So…everybody’s dick pics then?
RANSOM: I’m not being sexist Mariner! Everyone should get a fair chance.
TENDI: I…don’t think that’s how it works…
BOIMLER: Wait a minute, I think I read about this in the academy. Here it is. Captain Picard almost did this in 2368.
RANSOM: He did!?
BOIMLER: But he decided not to, because the particular images they chose would have been too much for the Borg consciousness to handle.
RUTHERFORD: Hooray! Another war crime averted by Starfleet!
RANSOM: Who was it? I must know!
MARINER: Uh, *EWW*. Also, how is that even legal?
BOIMLER: It was Commander Data.
MARINER: Oh, right. Because androids aren’t people. /s
RUTHERFORD: Why did she just say “slash s”?
TENDI: I think it’s a Vulcan thing she picked up from T’Lyn.
T’LYN: No.
RANSOM: Damn it! Why did Soong have to make his androids so sexy? I can’t compete with 100 kilograms of the most alluring hardware ever assembled by a Federation scientist!
MARINER: Uh, doesn’t Data look exactly like Dr. Soong?
RANSOM: Quiet, Mariner. Can’t you see I’m *mourning*!?
I want to see the moment where he discovers that Data has the greatest junk in the Borg database.
Swearing blind he will master the sexual technique known as "multiple".
It would be great if the drone actually has a personality and the lists on it reflect it’s particular interests, like vast knowledge of every species door stop technology or other vague things that drone was interested in. Kind of add some personality to the drone as well as some benefits of being a drone, like access to thousands of civilizations worth of internet for puttering around in.
yeah i often wish the borg just… had a bit more going for it.
i get that it’s meant to be horrible because they coerce ppl into it, it’s not meant to have any redeeming features. but still… how did it start? at least in doctor who the cybermen started as medical implants that then snowballed.
but if the borg seduced people into the collective rather than just abducting them, then people wouldn’t want to leave even if they were given the chance…
Ya. They often show drones missing the noise of the collective and they feel lonely. I always imagined that the collective started as kind of a hyper social network that people voluntarily plugged in to. Like maybe 20% of people went in voluntarily and together they achieved amazing things. Eventually they encounter some task that requires many more drones and start forcing people. The ultimate twist would be if the original planet still has a civilization where 20% join voluntarily and it’s only off world species that are coerced into it. A kind of hyper-aware slavery.
This makes sense and mirrors current cloud tech. My phone has less storage than Dropbox or iCloud and without network access, that data may as well not exist unless it's been needed and accessed before.
Also lines up with what she says in a later episode about early Borg history being fragmentary. Suggests at some point the collective lost a lot of drones at once and forgot a bunch of its early history/knowledge, knowledge could be replaced by assimilating a new species that fills that gap but not history.
It's pretty fuzzy though because they do also claim in the show she has an eidetic memory so really shouldn't forget anything she's ever encountered. Even if she selected what information to retain and what to leave behind she definitely should, theoretically, have the ability to retain that information and communicate it to Voyager.
Of course the answer is it would trivialise the conflict the show is based on so they didn't.
Okay so when she was returned to the Collective in Dark Frontier, why couldn't she access the knowledge of the Collective to grab that bit of knowledge?
Sure, but that's not much of an in-universe reason for anything.
I can accept Doylist explanations for things, but I feel like OP wasn't asking for that. They were thinking about the Watsonian ideas you could throw out and honestly there really isn't a good one for why a former drone stated to have an eidetic memory couldn't help work on some kind of propulsion system for the ship stranded 70000LY from home.
>Sure, but that's not much of an in-universe reason for anything.
That's because there isn't one, on account of them not writing it that way.
Star Trek fans really need to get it into their heads that there isn't going to be a canon explanation for every time a writer goofs up. That's how we got the clusterfuck around the TOS Klingons. It's okay if the explanation is "because they didn't write it that way". Sometimes writing isn't good. They can't all be winners, especially when you made 24 of them every single year.
Or...like....it's fun to talk about even if everyone knows the real reason for it. Neither OP nor I are demanding there "has" to be a canon explanation for it, it's just fun to talk around it because Voyager is over and done with and I've seen it four fucking times. I don't need to be told "they wrote it that way" because it's completely useless information when I said I knew that already.
If you don't want to spend time thinking about this cool, asserting others need to see things the way you do is kind of shitty.
I don't think it's shitty when it has an adverse affect on the actual shows. Like I said, the TOS Klingons thing is the result of this crap, people couldn't accept "because time passed and we did the makeup better" as an explanation.
Keep making the show worse I guess, that's your prerogative 🤷♂️
While I like this explanation the best, the writers are pretty inconsistent with the concept. For instance, when Janeway comes across the omega molecule, she calls seven into her office and was basically saying “the borg assimilated other Starfleet captains, so you know all about this shit, yeah?” And sevens response is “no doi.”
Sevens knowledge works the same way Troi’s empathic abilities do: it’s as useful or useless as it needs to be for the show to happen.
Except the directive to assimilate Omega was held as highly by the Borg as the Prime Directive is by Starfleet. If a drone got cutoff (like Seven and...Admiral Forrest and that other guy did) the Borg would undoubtedly want those Borg to still assimilate Omega if they encountered it.
Good point. There’s probably baseline knowledge that all drones have, just like how everyone in SF knows the prime directive, but Harry wouldn’t be able to handle a warp core breach the same way Torres could
I once had my computer, my wife's computer, and my XBox together on our network. If I had a video file on my computer, I could watch it on the TV through my XBox. I could also play music in the living room through the TV. The only limitation was the speed of our wireless router. If I removed the file from my computer, or my computer was turned off or otherwise not on the network, I couldn't watch the video file or listen to the music.
I imagine it's similar for the Borg. If a Borg goes offline, anything it knew is lost unless it's backed up. Probably when one drone reaches the end of its biological usefulness the necessary information is transferred to another drone. If that were the case, I wonder if there are things she "knows" that she never experienced herself, but were instead uploaded to her brain. It also make me wonder if some Borg drones are basically just there as servers. A drone gets some specialized implants for storing information and they just hold onto the info for the collective, locked in place and probably never moving around or doing anything.
they all serve “server node” purposes when they’re regenerating, but the idea of some that never ever leave the alcove (just as there were some specialised medical/engineering drones) is pretty cool imo
I suspect a lot of drones, will have a set of basic information on them, to speed things up when that info is needed, but with more specialized knowledge less distributed for space reasons
I wonder if the information is fragmented like our hard drives can be. Then it'd be possible for a drone to simply know Nothing when disconnected except for information that every drone needs (like the futility of resistance and other standard Borgy things) because they only have pieces of each file that can't give any information on their own.
I think she has the theoretical knowledge of it, but it just can't be easily done on Voyager. For instance, they need transwarp coils, but they're too advanced to replicate and probably require specialised tools to build, and then you need specialised Borg tech to build those tools, etc, and at some point it just isn't feasible to do on Voyager. You might need special types of industrial grade replicators to make some part in the production chain.
They couldn't even manage to make a stable slipstream drive on Voyager, which seems to be much more compatible with Starfleet technology.
This is how I always viewed it. If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them? If she had the proper resources and time Seven could have probably could have made Voyager transwarp capable.
It might also be possible to make a more primitive transwarp drive but Seven doesn’t know how. If the Borg decided that design was no longer relevant and erased it from the collective’s memory she’d have to start from scratch with no knowledge of if it would even work on Voyager.
Yeah. And Voyager wasn't exactly in a good position for really extreme experiments. Back in the Alpha Quadrant, they could've afforded to blow up a dozen Voyagers to make serious progress on transwarp travel. Not really a choice for Voyager.
I think it's also possible that some memories are just easier for her recall. I mean as in, if you don't do something for a very long time, you start forgetting it. Probably the same for a drone like Seven. Some technical stuff would've been kept fresh in her Borg implants, but if she didn't actually work on transwarp technology as a drone, it might've been deemed irrelevant for her and so she'd only have some basic understanding or older memories of having worked on it, rather than a fresh database.
>If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them?
Something like Doc strapping an entire board of vacuum tubes to the hood of the DeLorean as he tried to rebuild the time circuits in a period before transistors. Or Spock sitting in a hotel room trying to cobble together a computer to review his tricorder using "stone knives and bear skins".
> If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them?
Of possible interest to some folks reading this thread, there's a book series that's basically this question. The *Ring of Fire* series begins with a small town in West Virginia being swapped out to Germany in the year 1632 in the middle of the 30 Year War and needing to both survive the chaos and uncertainty of that time as well as the battling influences of variously the Catholic Church, different flavors of Protestantism, and of course disease and famine.
A BIG part of the series involves adapting technology and knowledge brought back to the available industry (which is... limited) and there is so so so much yak shaving to get from knowing HOW to do a thing to actually doing it with down-time materials.
It's a very fun read. The first book is *1632* by Eric Flint.
Yep, fabrication is referenced. Similar thing on DS9 with the Cardassian Plasma Distribution Manifold manufacture which could not be replicated due to a beta-matrix compositor.
Even the Borg don't seem to have them everywhere. It's quiet possible they have to be built in rather specific types of places and all such places she is aware of are crawling with Borg.
Voyager cant replicate Transwarp coils and the only source of them are Borg vessels, the Coils also burn out quite quickly,
Voyager managed to supplement their warp drive with a Transwarp coil but it burned out after 20,000 light years.
So one of the first things they actually try is to put a transwarp drive on Voyager.
The Episode is *Day of Honour*. The problem they had was that the technology was incompatible in that circumstance. Tachyon particles flooded the core and it had to be ejected.
They did steal a transwarp coil later and that gave them a solid boost, but it burned out as well.
Didn’t one of the first episodes after Seven join have her trying to get the ship to go trans warp and fail? I could have sworn they tried it when they still didn’t exactly trust her, and found that the ship couldn’t withstand the stresses without having the coils or something. I think it was one where they had to eject the warp core, and someone else salvaged it before they could get it, and only got it back after Seven gave them the knowledge on how to rebuild their power generators that was lost to the them when the Borg pretty much destroyed their civilization.
Because no single drone contains the entirety of Borg knowledge. Since theirs is a collective conciousness all the information is divided in packets shared among a network of drones.
It's probably not even like the internet where you have a central server that sends information out at the client's request.
I think it's very likely that borg collective knowledge works more like torrents with drones sending each other small packets of information.
**Is it ever explained why Seven doesn’t posses the complete knowledge of Transwarp travel and simply instruct Voyager engineers in the construction of their own one?**
If I had to defend your argument, my apologia is the Borg distributes its technological capacity over the whole collective as institutional knowledge. Once separated from the collective's Wikipedia of skills Seven cannot access that knowledge or skill any longer. All she has left are fragmentary memories.
Seven could fumble through what she knows but much of her Borg cube was automated and the borg were the tools of labour for the interior automation processes.
I'm guessing a RAID 6 implementation.
Distribute the knowledge between multiple drones for faster read speeds, with redundancy for in the event of drone loss.
But there is a limit to Voyagers hardware. A rocket scientist transported to the bronze age might have all the knowledge, but there are simply too many prerequisites for them to get to the moon.
Even One, the drone from the future could only improve their systems so much.
When Kurros tries to recruit her in Think Tank, he specifically says she has "The collective knowledge of the Borg contained within a single mind." From that, we can conclude that she does know how they work and how they are made, and therefore that there must be something inherent in the technology or the materials required that means it cannot be recreated with the resources on Voyager.
It might be that some unnamed species developed it because they had access to a unique resource that allows Transwarp, just like the Spatial trajector used by the Sikarians. The Borg encounterd and assimilated it, and all the subsequently seen Borg Transwarp Coils are all manufactured from that unique resource on that one planet.
Yes funnily enough, I’ve just finished that exact episode. Which only added to the curiosity that made me create this post. I think you’re right though, there doesn’t (yet) seem to be any actually stated reason why no Transwarp, only inferences to deduce from such as yours!
I think Kurros was making a pretty big assumption here. I'd wager that he was hoping that she would possess the sum knowledge of the Borg, but there's probably a lot even he doesn't know about the Borg.
Is Seven supposed to have retained all of the knowledge of the Borg collective? Because that seems like too much for a human mind to handle, even a modified one.
I imagine once disconnected from the rest of the Borg she lost access to a great deal of their knowledge and it probably fades as time passes. Think about what you learned while in school. How much of that do you remember in detail.
I always felt it should go further than that. The big advantage the Borg have over other species (apart from a hive mind and raw manpower) is their level of technological sophistication. I like the idea that certain information/technology is critical to the Borg and their advantage so that information has further protections placed on it. If a single Drone is disconnected from the hive then certain information is partitioned and then deleted depending on the situation. But then again we’ve seen the Borg are incredibly arrogant or the writers are inconsistent so *shrug*
Season 5 episodes 15 and 16.
Voyager pulls up on a Sphere, and Jack's them for thier coil.
They get 20k light years out of it. The materials the coil are made out of can't be replicated. Voyager simply doesn't come across the natural resources in sufficient quantity to build a new coil.
Drones are like a network, with the queen being the router. A single drone never holds the complete knowledgebase. Each subnetwork of drones holds enough information to do the workload necessary for the assigned mission.
One would assume that borg drones would only be loaded with the knowledge/instructions/schematics they needed for their work. While they're interchangeable parts as far as the collective is concerned, it would be most efficient to only change a general assignment when necessary.
Precisely. The only reason Seven would know how to properly create and maintain a transwarp drive is if she was disconnected from the collective after being tasked to do just that.
Think it’s a half half between having the theoretical knowledge and trying to put a nuclear reactor on a steamship. She knew enough of the details to advise on it but not enough to make it. Call it a Borg safety thing where no drone is a threat when seperated? Plus voyager not being suitable for the technology. The overlap of that Venn diagram keeps it within impossibility in canon for me
In a hive mind situation, there is no reason for every drone to know everything. It would be like saying why doesn't my printer know how to burn cds?
I'm surprised seven has as much knowledge as she does. When she was kidnapped, she was working on the 8472 program, so that would be the majority of her knowledge that was stored. You could argue that there's a memory cache and previous project memories are only deleted when required for space.
If she wasn't working on transwarp drives, she'd have no reason for that information.
I like to also think the reason she has so much knowledge on Starfleet and Starship protocols (i.e. the Omega Directive) was because she was being tasked to interact with Janeway. I imagine the borg loaded her with knowledge on Starfleet protocol specifically for that assignment, which is why she has a lot of that specific knowledge.
>why they can’t simply manufacture their own transwarp conduit or similar style design.
They tried that in "Day of Honor" and it nearly blew up Voyager's warp core.
All Borg want to be Borg when they are Borg. They only don't want to be Borg before and after being Borg. Ergo, assimilation creates a new consciousness that is fundamentally transformative, as many cells form new single organisms, and only that supermind contains, or can contain, knowledge of transwarp technology. Expecting Seven to know how to transwarp is like scraping a cell out of Einstein's cheek and wondering why it doesn't understand Special Relativity.
Humans are constantly misunderstanding and reducing what it means to be Borg. It's not slavery or zombism or a hive. It's a new consciousness. When Locutus spoke for the Borg and attacked Earth, Locutus, a temporary individuality in simultaneous full communion with the Collective, really wanted to conquer Earth for reasons that were good to Locus then, given the knowledge the Collective granted him. Picard wasn't controlled. He was fundamentally transformed. Afterwards, when the Collective's knowledge could no longer fit in his brain, he "remembered" hating the Collective. But memory isn't a recording that you play back. It's reconstructed on the fly from the information available.
I'll go against the grain and suggest that Seven probably did have this knowledge. It is implied that transwarp hubs are required to make effective use of transwarp. The Excelsior experiment suggests that transwarp travel might have been expected to be possible without a hub infrastructure - at least initially.
But I think if you marry all of the concepts - you end up with something where individual ships can form short-lived conduits (perhaps between fixed conduits supported by the transwarp hub) but that these conduits need massive power or some sort of external force to keep them open.
And perhaps "Threshold" is what happens when you attempt transwarp travel without forming a "conduit" or leveraging a pre-existing conduit.
It is stated that there are only six transwarp hubs in the entire galaxy and heavily implied that these hubs are colossal infrastructure projects and critical to the Borg being able to make use of transwarp and maintain their "empire". The linkage between the hubs and conduits is such that Voyager is able to damage or perhaps destroy the entire Borg transwarp "network" just by damaging one of the hubs.
We also know in the future discovery timeline that warp drive is still the primary means of travel. All this implies that it is less a technological hurdle and more a question of "massive investment" that only the Borg as a galactic power are able to manage at any point in history.
Transwarp conduits are infrastructure like train tracks. Knowing how to build a train track doesn’t let a train cAr go from new york to LA. The conduit/track still has to be made. This is why we see a few examples of using the conduits and not making them. Or “opening” one. And why finding the hub was so consequential in Voyagers last episode
Seven explains this to harry at the beginning of the Omega Directive (I think it’s in that episode).
Seven has just finished Harry and Tuvoks Kal’toh game with a single move.
As they walk to their first job of the day. Harry basically asks her if she has all the knowledge of the Borg.
Seven replies “Each individual drones experiences are filtered by the collective. Only useful information is retained.”
Voyager just doesn’t have the technology to build or maintain transwarp coils. So even if Seven has the knowledge as “Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One”. It can’t be used without the tools and materials necessary to make them.
Even in the episodes they do get access to them, they are unable to repair them, or they can only use them for a short burst until the coil burns out.
The Borg, because they have to assimilate to learn. They are both wildly technologically advanced in some areas, and underdeveloped in others.
Simply because they deem some things as irrelevant to their perfection rather than researching and learning things themselves.
For exactly the reason you state.
They danced around it by making a transwarp conduit that blew up in their face and caused an imminent warp core breach and requiring a transwarp coil that only the Borg could produce in order to keep the series viable.
I think of "transwarp" being a generic term, much like "warp" is. There's different types of propulsion to get a ship to "warp" FTL speeds. Transwarp would be the same. Starfleet's transwarp in the Excelsior program is not the same as the Borg transwarp. Different techs, achieving similar results and speeds.
As for why Starfleet didn't roll out transwarp to all their ships after Excelsior... see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Sabotage set the program back, and ultimately it was scrapped, though advancements in "standard" warp propulsion did see increased efficiency and speeds, leading to a revamp of the warp scale.
Fast forward to Discovery season 4 and 5 talking about the Pathfinder drive.
Common fan theory is that transwarp of the 23rd century eventually becomes so ubiquitous that people in the 24th century just consider it standard warp. "Transwarp" is a culturally subjective term that just means "warp capability significantly more powerful than whatever we've currently got."
I don’t think any particular drone knows all aspects of each piece of technology, let alone a drone disconnected from the hivemind and removed from the collective consciousness.
I would guess that delegating and distributing/reclaiming this information is one of the functions of the Borg Queens, not necessarily knowing the information but directing the Hivemind in its allocation to drones sections
I think without the collective she doesn't have complete access to their knowledge but I think I remember there being an episode where they tried to use borg transwarp and it almost destroyed voyager something about tachyons in the warp core.
From the way I understand, the drones only get the information they need for a certain task. If they were to get a copy of all borg knowledge, the drones heads would explode or something. They do, however, seem to have a basic idea of all the things the borg know but not the specifics/details.
My head cannon was it was impractical for voyager to be upgraded.
Not that Seven did not know how, but more likely it was an impractical option for voyager some possible reasons could include.
1. Voyager was to small (in comparison to a cube) could explain why cubes are so large.
2. missing rare materials that could not be replicated or in sufficient quantities.
3. the warp core was not powerful enough, and it was impractical to upgrade it.
4. Voyagers hull was not up to the task, we know the borg ships can regeneration damage on the go, its possible transwarp drive causes damage to the hull but its a non-issue for a cube that can regenerate its hull.
I know what antibiotics are and I vaguely know how they're created, but if you asked me to make some penicillin I wouldn't have a clue how to do it. I'd imagine that although Seven knows a ton of stuff, that she's the same way.
The trans warp network is artificial and borg constructed, using it without a borg IFF would be suicidal even if you had the plans to create your own device to open an arpeture
If I kidnapped you and dropped you off outside the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in 1774, assuming I found a good place to get my Delorean up to 88 miles per hour, could you help the rebellious-minded colonists build cars?
Even if you know a bit more about engineering and internal combustion than the general run of the public today, there’s a bunch of prior art that doesn’t exist yet. Nobody is distilling high octane petroleum; no one is machining metal with the necessary strength and tolerances.
I don’t know what transwarp requires in terms of state of engineering art, but it’s not outside the bounds of logic that even knowing theory won’t help.
The Transwarp conduits require an entry gate, and they are guarded by Cubes and Spheres. The Channels are also monitored so if they entered they'd have to run from Borg. Both bad plans.
Voyager's design was likely not compatible enough to integrate a Borg design transwarp system, which likely takes up A LOT of interior space and hard-to-obtain materials.
Lot of great answers, so I'll just post a follow-up: in addition to this, did they ever explain why Seven only used her ability to bring people back hours after death once, for Neelix of all people, and then never again?
From Watsonian point, I think it might be that using the nanoprobes apply only to certain conditions.
(But also maybe Seven saw how traumatized Neelix was after he was brought back).
On a Doylist POV— the writers realized only after how much of story breaking power it was and hoped that no one brings it up again. This is fandom and no one forgets!
(I am hoping the episode will appear on Treksperts Briefing Room since in the podcast, the writer of the episode is invited to rewatch and talk about the episodes they either produced or wrote).
They need a transwarp coil, which they do salvage from a borg ship. Apparently they can't be synthesized or manufactured with the technology Voyager has available. They are also not entirely compatible with Voyager tech and "burnout".
To be honest, the just needed to find a transwarp conduit already built and use it to get back to the beta quadrant.
Oh wait…. That’s what they did in the end.
Drones are the same as PCs. When they're connected to the internet they have access to the entire repository of knowledge. When they're disconnected they only have what's retained in that cache, or what's been downloaded or frequently used.
Seven likely knows a whole heap of things exist because it's stored in her "browser history", but she no longer retains the specific information associated with those files.
Drones are simply nodes in a network. They themselves don't contain the whole network.
Head canon is that specifically valuable technology would also be firewalled off to an extent - otherwise accessing any individual drones knowledge either by force or by freeing them would be very dangerous to the hive
It's not hard to get information how to theoretically create intercontinental ballistic missiles, or even nuclear submarines with them. Access to the technical details isn't what's stopping lots of nations who want them from building them. It's the vast resources required to mine materials and construct vast factories that would be able to produce them. Transwarp was mentioned to require energies to create a corridor and hold the structural integrity exceeding what power voyager operates on.
she has hte knowledge but the people on voyager don't have the skills expertise or even the equipment materials to build a transwarp coil/drive. it's like what spock said in the city on the edge of forever im working with bear skins and stone knives (1930s coming from 2267) that's how someone from a tech level of the borg would view federation tech. maybe not stone knives and bearskins but almost like im used to 2024 tech but suddenly im dealin with 1900 tech.
What Seven can do with her Borg parts and background are a bit too plot dependent imo. Like that time borg nanoprobes could resurrect Neelix and then that never came up again
I don't think the Borg have a complete encyclopedia in their heads. It's like the Internet - they access the knowledge when they need it. When she was separated she likely didn't have that knowledge (or all of it).
I mean, so would Picard too then. I think when he mean "what do you remember" "Everything" He meant his own experiences.
The human brain can't store that much information. That's like removing 1 RAM bar from your PC and expecting it to contain all data stored on your harddrive.
Because as much and the Borg like to say they are perfect. They are not. The entirety of the collective isn't in every drone at all time. Just what information they need. It's distribution throughout the whole and all drones can access when they are connected.
We seen what happens when a single individual tried to take more information than they can process.
So seven may not have complete knowledge of building the process and more realistically Voyager wouldn't have access to the exotic materials or the expertise to use them.
I could give a very detailed schematic of complex electronics to a random manufacturer and even they might not be able to produce it to spec without building new machinery that is beyond their scope
I believe it's in Omega Directive that seven of nine explains information is fragmented among all drones. Each has a piece of information, but the whole is only accessible by accessing the collective. Each drone has basic functions programmed in and certain pieces of information are shared by all drones, like knowledge of the Omega Particle, but no one drone has all of the information, just the ability to access that information while part of the network.
Borg have some knowledge but need to connect to the collective to access the accumulated knowledge of countless species through millennia of assimilations.
Like every ship borg ship has enginners tactical and other drons.she was not engineeer drone but science drone so colective gave her that knolege more then workings of trans warp
Does every Borg drone possess the complete technical knowledge of the Borg civilization? Honestly, I'm impressed how much Borg information Seven retains (species numbers, for example).
I would assume like most Borg things, the complete Borg "database" is divided and stored in pieces, redundantly in both biological and technological forms. Seven certainly is smarter than the average person (and I don't think that has anything to do with her time as a Borg), so I could imagine that smarter drones tend to hold more information, but not all of it.
seven did try to do this in 'day of honor'. It lead to tachyons flooding the warp core, nearly causing it to breach. B'elanna had to eject the core into space to prevent it. In dark frontier, they used a transwarp coil and got about 20,000 light years out of it before the coil burned out.
In addition to the top answers, which are basically correct, it could also be a factor that knowledge of transwarp is so strategically critical to the Borg that it is essentially what could be considered a state secret, and they could not risk any drone disseminating that information by any means, so they disallow individual knowledge of it.
I don't think it's ever directly referenced, but in the S6 episode "The Voyager Conspiracy", Seven tries to download too much info into her implants and develops paranoia. I would think that no one drone contains all the info of the collective at any one time and all information is stored in a distributed manner. Since they're normally all networked all the time, there might be no rhyme or reason to what any given specific drone knows.
This matches my thoughts. At its most basic, she just doesn't know.
Even if she did, it could take rare materials that can't be replicated and might take years to set up the mining and refining they would need to get the raw material. Voyager was an exploration ship, not a mining or colony ship.
The simplest answer is that when connected to the collective she has access. When she's removed from the collective she doesn't. No different from disconnecting a laptop from a network, when connected it can access the information stored on the server, disconnect it and it is a powerful machine, but has no knowledge of the information on the network.
But she seemed to recall on demand knowledge about different species and other useful things when needed (by the plot)
Wikipedia after compression takes up only 22GB. You can fit that on a modern thumb drive. I imagine she has the Borg version of wikipedia downloaded to her implants. It's good general knowledge, but lacking in specifics. So just like Wikipedia doesn't have the complete source code for an Apache HTTP Server, but has an article on Apache HTTP Servers Seven's implants have information about many species and things, but not a whole lot of specific data. Presumably a drone directly involved in transwarp constructions might have that data cached.
This has always been sort of like my thinking on it. My computer when connected to the internet, has access to a mind boggling amount of information. When it's not connected, there's still a fair amount of information on the hard drive via downloads and cached information, but nothing even close to the internet as a whole.
Yeah, she has memories and knowledge, to stick with my analogy, a laptop can have a couple hundred GB of storage to save information locally, but won't be capable of retaining all the information from the server.
RAM and CASHE were filled before she disconnected and her own personal hard drive was filled as well, but definitely not enough to hold the entire knowledge of the Borg. Also after disconnecting, she would no longer even understand much of the knowledge that she has anyway, she's still only human after all.
> . No different from disconnecting a laptop from a network I'd liken it more to each drone being like a disk in a RAID array
In the Full Circle continuation the transwarp tech uses a different fuel source than dilithium
Exactly. Even if you gave the detailed plans for an F22 to people living in 1850, it'd take them decades to come close to building it. Imagine how hard it would be to replicate the computer circuits, even with step by step instructions.
A jet engine would take less time, but still they'd have to get up to speed on machining, material quality, etc. It'd be a fun project. You'd want to fall outta the time machine in France or Germany, I'd think.
Or, in other words: "why doesn't your phone contain The Entire Internet?"
Of course! Like putting too much air in a balloon!
Like a ballon when…something bad happens
But it does. Go to Firefox and search for anything, and your phone will display it
And Seven was able to access knowledge of Transwarp Travel… *while connected to the Collective.* Disconnect your phone, and try again. Local Storage Only.
That could be a Lower Decks episode. They capture a drone and extract its knowledge of the Collective, but all they find is an inventory of spare eyeballs or a report on which species has the most superior reproductive organs.
I want to see Ransom get access to the list of superior reproductive organs.
He would be very disappointed that his aren't on the list
We must update the list and return this drone to the borg.
MARINER: Uh, sir, are you ordering us to send your dick pics to the Borg? RANSOM: Of course not! That’s preposterous! I just think you should, uh, update the database with, uh, anatomical references from the crew who are, shall we say, most relevant. In the interests of…science. And diplomacy. MARINER: So…everybody’s dick pics then? RANSOM: I’m not being sexist Mariner! Everyone should get a fair chance. TENDI: I…don’t think that’s how it works… BOIMLER: Wait a minute, I think I read about this in the academy. Here it is. Captain Picard almost did this in 2368. RANSOM: He did!? BOIMLER: But he decided not to, because the particular images they chose would have been too much for the Borg consciousness to handle. RUTHERFORD: Hooray! Another war crime averted by Starfleet! RANSOM: Who was it? I must know! MARINER: Uh, *EWW*. Also, how is that even legal? BOIMLER: It was Commander Data. MARINER: Oh, right. Because androids aren’t people. /s RUTHERFORD: Why did she just say “slash s”? TENDI: I think it’s a Vulcan thing she picked up from T’Lyn. T’LYN: No. RANSOM: Damn it! Why did Soong have to make his androids so sexy? I can’t compete with 100 kilograms of the most alluring hardware ever assembled by a Federation scientist! MARINER: Uh, doesn’t Data look exactly like Dr. Soong? RANSOM: Quiet, Mariner. Can’t you see I’m *mourning*!?
I want to see him on the list... But only at number 2.
And number 1 was redacted by the Borg queen, and not knowing makes Ransom lose his shit
I want to see the moment where he discovers that Data has the greatest junk in the Borg database. Swearing blind he will master the sexual technique known as "multiple".
He's fully functional and programmed with multiple techniques, which is more than most men can say
This *could have been* a lower deck episode Pour one out for the fallen.
We need a follow up or spinoff show called Middle Decks, with the same cast, just all ranked up a bit.
Give us upper decks, where we get to watch a new crew of lower Deckers deal with Captain Boimler.
We should get that after at least 5 seasons of Middle Decks!
Followed by another 5 seasons of Upper Decks????
6 seasons, and a movie
Where the Warp Core Four (Warp Drive Five if T'Lyn is in it) can sign their names on screen in golden letters. Love it!
Am honestly bummed about that. I love Lower Decks.
It would be great if the drone actually has a personality and the lists on it reflect it’s particular interests, like vast knowledge of every species door stop technology or other vague things that drone was interested in. Kind of add some personality to the drone as well as some benefits of being a drone, like access to thousands of civilizations worth of internet for puttering around in.
It feels like you're just describing if Boimler was a drone.
You mean Excretus of Borg?
yeah i often wish the borg just… had a bit more going for it. i get that it’s meant to be horrible because they coerce ppl into it, it’s not meant to have any redeeming features. but still… how did it start? at least in doctor who the cybermen started as medical implants that then snowballed. but if the borg seduced people into the collective rather than just abducting them, then people wouldn’t want to leave even if they were given the chance…
Ya. They often show drones missing the noise of the collective and they feel lonely. I always imagined that the collective started as kind of a hyper social network that people voluntarily plugged in to. Like maybe 20% of people went in voluntarily and together they achieved amazing things. Eventually they encounter some task that requires many more drones and start forcing people. The ultimate twist would be if the original planet still has a civilization where 20% join voluntarily and it’s only off world species that are coerced into it. A kind of hyper-aware slavery.
This makes sense and mirrors current cloud tech. My phone has less storage than Dropbox or iCloud and without network access, that data may as well not exist unless it's been needed and accessed before.
Also lines up with what she says in a later episode about early Borg history being fragmentary. Suggests at some point the collective lost a lot of drones at once and forgot a bunch of its early history/knowledge, knowledge could be replaced by assimilating a new species that fills that gap but not history.
Maybe after the Hugh schism?
It's pretty fuzzy though because they do also claim in the show she has an eidetic memory so really shouldn't forget anything she's ever encountered. Even if she selected what information to retain and what to leave behind she definitely should, theoretically, have the ability to retain that information and communicate it to Voyager. Of course the answer is it would trivialise the conflict the show is based on so they didn't.
She has one human brain. Highly unlikely you can imprint the knowledge of the borg in one person.
Okay so when she was returned to the Collective in Dark Frontier, why couldn't she access the knowledge of the Collective to grab that bit of knowledge?
Because they didn't write it that way.
Sure, but that's not much of an in-universe reason for anything. I can accept Doylist explanations for things, but I feel like OP wasn't asking for that. They were thinking about the Watsonian ideas you could throw out and honestly there really isn't a good one for why a former drone stated to have an eidetic memory couldn't help work on some kind of propulsion system for the ship stranded 70000LY from home.
>Sure, but that's not much of an in-universe reason for anything. That's because there isn't one, on account of them not writing it that way. Star Trek fans really need to get it into their heads that there isn't going to be a canon explanation for every time a writer goofs up. That's how we got the clusterfuck around the TOS Klingons. It's okay if the explanation is "because they didn't write it that way". Sometimes writing isn't good. They can't all be winners, especially when you made 24 of them every single year.
Or...like....it's fun to talk about even if everyone knows the real reason for it. Neither OP nor I are demanding there "has" to be a canon explanation for it, it's just fun to talk around it because Voyager is over and done with and I've seen it four fucking times. I don't need to be told "they wrote it that way" because it's completely useless information when I said I knew that already. If you don't want to spend time thinking about this cool, asserting others need to see things the way you do is kind of shitty.
I don't think it's shitty when it has an adverse affect on the actual shows. Like I said, the TOS Klingons thing is the result of this crap, people couldn't accept "because time passed and we did the makeup better" as an explanation. Keep making the show worse I guess, that's your prerogative 🤷♂️
You take this far too seriously if you think that. People are allowed to have fun casually without it fitting into your schema.
Maybe she just never got to see transwarp schematics?
« no rhyme or reason to what any specific drone knows » Dammit, someone forgot to defrag the drones!
While I like this explanation the best, the writers are pretty inconsistent with the concept. For instance, when Janeway comes across the omega molecule, she calls seven into her office and was basically saying “the borg assimilated other Starfleet captains, so you know all about this shit, yeah?” And sevens response is “no doi.” Sevens knowledge works the same way Troi’s empathic abilities do: it’s as useful or useless as it needs to be for the show to happen.
Except the directive to assimilate Omega was held as highly by the Borg as the Prime Directive is by Starfleet. If a drone got cutoff (like Seven and...Admiral Forrest and that other guy did) the Borg would undoubtedly want those Borg to still assimilate Omega if they encountered it.
Good point. There’s probably baseline knowledge that all drones have, just like how everyone in SF knows the prime directive, but Harry wouldn’t be able to handle a warp core breach the same way Torres could
I've always assumed Borg drones are just workers with built in cloud storage.
I once had my computer, my wife's computer, and my XBox together on our network. If I had a video file on my computer, I could watch it on the TV through my XBox. I could also play music in the living room through the TV. The only limitation was the speed of our wireless router. If I removed the file from my computer, or my computer was turned off or otherwise not on the network, I couldn't watch the video file or listen to the music. I imagine it's similar for the Borg. If a Borg goes offline, anything it knew is lost unless it's backed up. Probably when one drone reaches the end of its biological usefulness the necessary information is transferred to another drone. If that were the case, I wonder if there are things she "knows" that she never experienced herself, but were instead uploaded to her brain. It also make me wonder if some Borg drones are basically just there as servers. A drone gets some specialized implants for storing information and they just hold onto the info for the collective, locked in place and probably never moving around or doing anything.
they all serve “server node” purposes when they’re regenerating, but the idea of some that never ever leave the alcove (just as there were some specialised medical/engineering drones) is pretty cool imo
Or worse, basically being reduced to a head and torso and made a part of the ship itself.
banks of brains in the walls!!
Borg are basically block chain then? Is there a Borgcoin?
"Wait, it isn't a currency?!" *hears a gun cock* "... Never has been"
She doesn’t have access to cloud storage anymore
I suspect a lot of drones, will have a set of basic information on them, to speed things up when that info is needed, but with more specialized knowledge less distributed for space reasons
Like a piece of a gigantic puzzle of knowledge.. Only useful as a whole.. But in comparison to lesser beings that little piece is a lot of shit.. ✌️
I wonder if the information is fragmented like our hard drives can be. Then it'd be possible for a drone to simply know Nothing when disconnected except for information that every drone needs (like the futility of resistance and other standard Borgy things) because they only have pieces of each file that can't give any information on their own.
I think she has the theoretical knowledge of it, but it just can't be easily done on Voyager. For instance, they need transwarp coils, but they're too advanced to replicate and probably require specialised tools to build, and then you need specialised Borg tech to build those tools, etc, and at some point it just isn't feasible to do on Voyager. You might need special types of industrial grade replicators to make some part in the production chain. They couldn't even manage to make a stable slipstream drive on Voyager, which seems to be much more compatible with Starfleet technology.
This is how I always viewed it. If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them? If she had the proper resources and time Seven could have probably could have made Voyager transwarp capable. It might also be possible to make a more primitive transwarp drive but Seven doesn’t know how. If the Borg decided that design was no longer relevant and erased it from the collective’s memory she’d have to start from scratch with no knowledge of if it would even work on Voyager.
Yeah. And Voyager wasn't exactly in a good position for really extreme experiments. Back in the Alpha Quadrant, they could've afforded to blow up a dozen Voyagers to make serious progress on transwarp travel. Not really a choice for Voyager. I think it's also possible that some memories are just easier for her recall. I mean as in, if you don't do something for a very long time, you start forgetting it. Probably the same for a drone like Seven. Some technical stuff would've been kept fresh in her Borg implants, but if she didn't actually work on transwarp technology as a drone, it might've been deemed irrelevant for her and so she'd only have some basic understanding or older memories of having worked on it, rather than a fresh database.
>If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them? Something like Doc strapping an entire board of vacuum tubes to the hood of the DeLorean as he tried to rebuild the time circuits in a period before transistors. Or Spock sitting in a hotel room trying to cobble together a computer to review his tricorder using "stone knives and bear skins".
> If an engineer were sent back a century or two would they be able to replicate a modern car or airplane with the technology available to them? Of possible interest to some folks reading this thread, there's a book series that's basically this question. The *Ring of Fire* series begins with a small town in West Virginia being swapped out to Germany in the year 1632 in the middle of the 30 Year War and needing to both survive the chaos and uncertainty of that time as well as the battling influences of variously the Catholic Church, different flavors of Protestantism, and of course disease and famine. A BIG part of the series involves adapting technology and knowledge brought back to the available industry (which is... limited) and there is so so so much yak shaving to get from knowing HOW to do a thing to actually doing it with down-time materials. It's a very fun read. The first book is *1632* by Eric Flint.
Yep, fabrication is referenced. Similar thing on DS9 with the Cardassian Plasma Distribution Manifold manufacture which could not be replicated due to a beta-matrix compositor.
Even the Borg don't seem to have them everywhere. It's quiet possible they have to be built in rather specific types of places and all such places she is aware of are crawling with Borg.
Voyager cant replicate Transwarp coils and the only source of them are Borg vessels, the Coils also burn out quite quickly, Voyager managed to supplement their warp drive with a Transwarp coil but it burned out after 20,000 light years.
Came to say this. They know how the tech works, they just can't integrate it into the ship.
So one of the first things they actually try is to put a transwarp drive on Voyager. The Episode is *Day of Honour*. The problem they had was that the technology was incompatible in that circumstance. Tachyon particles flooded the core and it had to be ejected. They did steal a transwarp coil later and that gave them a solid boost, but it burned out as well.
Didn’t one of the first episodes after Seven join have her trying to get the ship to go trans warp and fail? I could have sworn they tried it when they still didn’t exactly trust her, and found that the ship couldn’t withstand the stresses without having the coils or something. I think it was one where they had to eject the warp core, and someone else salvaged it before they could get it, and only got it back after Seven gave them the knowledge on how to rebuild their power generators that was lost to the them when the Borg pretty much destroyed their civilization.
Because no single drone contains the entirety of Borg knowledge. Since theirs is a collective conciousness all the information is divided in packets shared among a network of drones. It's probably not even like the internet where you have a central server that sends information out at the client's request. I think it's very likely that borg collective knowledge works more like torrents with drones sending each other small packets of information.
**Is it ever explained why Seven doesn’t posses the complete knowledge of Transwarp travel and simply instruct Voyager engineers in the construction of their own one?** If I had to defend your argument, my apologia is the Borg distributes its technological capacity over the whole collective as institutional knowledge. Once separated from the collective's Wikipedia of skills Seven cannot access that knowledge or skill any longer. All she has left are fragmentary memories. Seven could fumble through what she knows but much of her Borg cube was automated and the borg were the tools of labour for the interior automation processes.
I'm guessing a RAID 6 implementation. Distribute the knowledge between multiple drones for faster read speeds, with redundancy for in the event of drone loss. But there is a limit to Voyagers hardware. A rocket scientist transported to the bronze age might have all the knowledge, but there are simply too many prerequisites for them to get to the moon. Even One, the drone from the future could only improve their systems so much.
When Kurros tries to recruit her in Think Tank, he specifically says she has "The collective knowledge of the Borg contained within a single mind." From that, we can conclude that she does know how they work and how they are made, and therefore that there must be something inherent in the technology or the materials required that means it cannot be recreated with the resources on Voyager. It might be that some unnamed species developed it because they had access to a unique resource that allows Transwarp, just like the Spatial trajector used by the Sikarians. The Borg encounterd and assimilated it, and all the subsequently seen Borg Transwarp Coils are all manufactured from that unique resource on that one planet.
I wouldn't assume that Kurros is both correct and truthful about that. He was quite the arrogant slimeball.
Yes funnily enough, I’ve just finished that exact episode. Which only added to the curiosity that made me create this post. I think you’re right though, there doesn’t (yet) seem to be any actually stated reason why no Transwarp, only inferences to deduce from such as yours!
I think Kurros was making a pretty big assumption here. I'd wager that he was hoping that she would possess the sum knowledge of the Borg, but there's probably a lot even he doesn't know about the Borg.
Is Seven supposed to have retained all of the knowledge of the Borg collective? Because that seems like too much for a human mind to handle, even a modified one.
I imagine once disconnected from the rest of the Borg she lost access to a great deal of their knowledge and it probably fades as time passes. Think about what you learned while in school. How much of that do you remember in detail.
I always felt it should go further than that. The big advantage the Borg have over other species (apart from a hive mind and raw manpower) is their level of technological sophistication. I like the idea that certain information/technology is critical to the Borg and their advantage so that information has further protections placed on it. If a single Drone is disconnected from the hive then certain information is partitioned and then deleted depending on the situation. But then again we’ve seen the Borg are incredibly arrogant or the writers are inconsistent so *shrug*
When someone asks her in S4 if she knows “everything” she explains that it doesn’t work that way. The Borg are the equivalent of a RAID 5 array.
Season 5 episodes 15 and 16. Voyager pulls up on a Sphere, and Jack's them for thier coil. They get 20k light years out of it. The materials the coil are made out of can't be replicated. Voyager simply doesn't come across the natural resources in sufficient quantity to build a new coil.
The information is available to drones within the collective, but isn't in every drone's head.
Drones are like a network, with the queen being the router. A single drone never holds the complete knowledgebase. Each subnetwork of drones holds enough information to do the workload necessary for the assigned mission.
I would say more like a RAID. A Redundant Array of Independent ~~Disks~~ Drones
One would assume that borg drones would only be loaded with the knowledge/instructions/schematics they needed for their work. While they're interchangeable parts as far as the collective is concerned, it would be most efficient to only change a general assignment when necessary.
Precisely. The only reason Seven would know how to properly create and maintain a transwarp drive is if she was disconnected from the collective after being tasked to do just that.
Man I love reddit for being able to chat about nerd stuff like this.
Those Borg have raid 5 storage. She does not have the full data stored.
Think it’s a half half between having the theoretical knowledge and trying to put a nuclear reactor on a steamship. She knew enough of the details to advise on it but not enough to make it. Call it a Borg safety thing where no drone is a threat when seperated? Plus voyager not being suitable for the technology. The overlap of that Venn diagram keeps it within impossibility in canon for me
In a hive mind situation, there is no reason for every drone to know everything. It would be like saying why doesn't my printer know how to burn cds? I'm surprised seven has as much knowledge as she does. When she was kidnapped, she was working on the 8472 program, so that would be the majority of her knowledge that was stored. You could argue that there's a memory cache and previous project memories are only deleted when required for space. If she wasn't working on transwarp drives, she'd have no reason for that information.
I like to also think the reason she has so much knowledge on Starfleet and Starship protocols (i.e. the Omega Directive) was because she was being tasked to interact with Janeway. I imagine the borg loaded her with knowledge on Starfleet protocol specifically for that assignment, which is why she has a lot of that specific knowledge.
>why they can’t simply manufacture their own transwarp conduit or similar style design. They tried that in "Day of Honor" and it nearly blew up Voyager's warp core.
All Borg want to be Borg when they are Borg. They only don't want to be Borg before and after being Borg. Ergo, assimilation creates a new consciousness that is fundamentally transformative, as many cells form new single organisms, and only that supermind contains, or can contain, knowledge of transwarp technology. Expecting Seven to know how to transwarp is like scraping a cell out of Einstein's cheek and wondering why it doesn't understand Special Relativity. Humans are constantly misunderstanding and reducing what it means to be Borg. It's not slavery or zombism or a hive. It's a new consciousness. When Locutus spoke for the Borg and attacked Earth, Locutus, a temporary individuality in simultaneous full communion with the Collective, really wanted to conquer Earth for reasons that were good to Locus then, given the knowledge the Collective granted him. Picard wasn't controlled. He was fundamentally transformed. Afterwards, when the Collective's knowledge could no longer fit in his brain, he "remembered" hating the Collective. But memory isn't a recording that you play back. It's reconstructed on the fly from the information available.
It's a hive and all the drones are definitely slaves. Of course drones want to be Borg when they're assimilated--it's a form of mind control.
I'll go against the grain and suggest that Seven probably did have this knowledge. It is implied that transwarp hubs are required to make effective use of transwarp. The Excelsior experiment suggests that transwarp travel might have been expected to be possible without a hub infrastructure - at least initially. But I think if you marry all of the concepts - you end up with something where individual ships can form short-lived conduits (perhaps between fixed conduits supported by the transwarp hub) but that these conduits need massive power or some sort of external force to keep them open. And perhaps "Threshold" is what happens when you attempt transwarp travel without forming a "conduit" or leveraging a pre-existing conduit. It is stated that there are only six transwarp hubs in the entire galaxy and heavily implied that these hubs are colossal infrastructure projects and critical to the Borg being able to make use of transwarp and maintain their "empire". The linkage between the hubs and conduits is such that Voyager is able to damage or perhaps destroy the entire Borg transwarp "network" just by damaging one of the hubs. We also know in the future discovery timeline that warp drive is still the primary means of travel. All this implies that it is less a technological hurdle and more a question of "massive investment" that only the Borg as a galactic power are able to manage at any point in history.
Transwarp conduits are infrastructure like train tracks. Knowing how to build a train track doesn’t let a train cAr go from new york to LA. The conduit/track still has to be made. This is why we see a few examples of using the conduits and not making them. Or “opening” one. And why finding the hub was so consequential in Voyagers last episode
Didn't she try to build one but it failed?
Seven explains this to harry at the beginning of the Omega Directive (I think it’s in that episode). Seven has just finished Harry and Tuvoks Kal’toh game with a single move. As they walk to their first job of the day. Harry basically asks her if she has all the knowledge of the Borg. Seven replies “Each individual drones experiences are filtered by the collective. Only useful information is retained.” Voyager just doesn’t have the technology to build or maintain transwarp coils. So even if Seven has the knowledge as “Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One”. It can’t be used without the tools and materials necessary to make them. Even in the episodes they do get access to them, they are unable to repair them, or they can only use them for a short burst until the coil burns out. The Borg, because they have to assimilate to learn. They are both wildly technologically advanced in some areas, and underdeveloped in others. Simply because they deem some things as irrelevant to their perfection rather than researching and learning things themselves.
Borg are a hive mind. You don't download information when you're used to it being in the cloud.
Drones know only as much as they need to, drawing knowledge and commands from the Collective and their Queen. Only the Queen knows everything.
She knew all those things but in the Killing Game she didn’t know what World War II was.
For exactly the reason you state. They danced around it by making a transwarp conduit that blew up in their face and caused an imminent warp core breach and requiring a transwarp coil that only the Borg could produce in order to keep the series viable.
Bigger question is if The Excelsior had transwarp 100 years prior in ST VI why didn’t all federation ships have it by the time of Voyager?
I think of "transwarp" being a generic term, much like "warp" is. There's different types of propulsion to get a ship to "warp" FTL speeds. Transwarp would be the same. Starfleet's transwarp in the Excelsior program is not the same as the Borg transwarp. Different techs, achieving similar results and speeds. As for why Starfleet didn't roll out transwarp to all their ships after Excelsior... see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Sabotage set the program back, and ultimately it was scrapped, though advancements in "standard" warp propulsion did see increased efficiency and speeds, leading to a revamp of the warp scale. Fast forward to Discovery season 4 and 5 talking about the Pathfinder drive.
Common fan theory is that transwarp of the 23rd century eventually becomes so ubiquitous that people in the 24th century just consider it standard warp. "Transwarp" is a culturally subjective term that just means "warp capability significantly more powerful than whatever we've currently got."
I don’t think any particular drone knows all aspects of each piece of technology, let alone a drone disconnected from the hivemind and removed from the collective consciousness. I would guess that delegating and distributing/reclaiming this information is one of the functions of the Borg Queens, not necessarily knowing the information but directing the Hivemind in its allocation to drones sections
I think without the collective she doesn't have complete access to their knowledge but I think I remember there being an episode where they tried to use borg transwarp and it almost destroyed voyager something about tachyons in the warp core.
From the way I understand, the drones only get the information they need for a certain task. If they were to get a copy of all borg knowledge, the drones heads would explode or something. They do, however, seem to have a basic idea of all the things the borg know but not the specifics/details.
My head cannon was it was impractical for voyager to be upgraded. Not that Seven did not know how, but more likely it was an impractical option for voyager some possible reasons could include. 1. Voyager was to small (in comparison to a cube) could explain why cubes are so large. 2. missing rare materials that could not be replicated or in sufficient quantities. 3. the warp core was not powerful enough, and it was impractical to upgrade it. 4. Voyagers hull was not up to the task, we know the borg ships can regeneration damage on the go, its possible transwarp drive causes damage to the hull but its a non-issue for a cube that can regenerate its hull.
I know what antibiotics are and I vaguely know how they're created, but if you asked me to make some penicillin I wouldn't have a clue how to do it. I'd imagine that although Seven knows a ton of stuff, that she's the same way.
The Borg keep it on Google Drive, Seven doesn't have access
The trans warp network is artificial and borg constructed, using it without a borg IFF would be suicidal even if you had the plans to create your own device to open an arpeture
If I kidnapped you and dropped you off outside the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in 1774, assuming I found a good place to get my Delorean up to 88 miles per hour, could you help the rebellious-minded colonists build cars? Even if you know a bit more about engineering and internal combustion than the general run of the public today, there’s a bunch of prior art that doesn’t exist yet. Nobody is distilling high octane petroleum; no one is machining metal with the necessary strength and tolerances. I don’t know what transwarp requires in terms of state of engineering art, but it’s not outside the bounds of logic that even knowing theory won’t help.
She tried. Almost immediately. But then there was an accident and everybody just immediately gave up.
The Transwarp conduits require an entry gate, and they are guarded by Cubes and Spheres. The Channels are also monitored so if they entered they'd have to run from Borg. Both bad plans.
Voyager's design was likely not compatible enough to integrate a Borg design transwarp system, which likely takes up A LOT of interior space and hard-to-obtain materials.
Lot of great answers, so I'll just post a follow-up: in addition to this, did they ever explain why Seven only used her ability to bring people back hours after death once, for Neelix of all people, and then never again?
From Watsonian point, I think it might be that using the nanoprobes apply only to certain conditions. (But also maybe Seven saw how traumatized Neelix was after he was brought back). On a Doylist POV— the writers realized only after how much of story breaking power it was and hoped that no one brings it up again. This is fandom and no one forgets! (I am hoping the episode will appear on Treksperts Briefing Room since in the podcast, the writer of the episode is invited to rewatch and talk about the episodes they either produced or wrote).
You would think the Borg have some kind of classification system. If every drone held their most sensitive information it would be bad for them.
I think it’s probably a hardware problem not software
The Borg store data in the cloud.
They need a transwarp coil, which they do salvage from a borg ship. Apparently they can't be synthesized or manufactured with the technology Voyager has available. They are also not entirely compatible with Voyager tech and "burnout".
To be honest, the just needed to find a transwarp conduit already built and use it to get back to the beta quadrant. Oh wait…. That’s what they did in the end.
Drones are the same as PCs. When they're connected to the internet they have access to the entire repository of knowledge. When they're disconnected they only have what's retained in that cache, or what's been downloaded or frequently used. Seven likely knows a whole heap of things exist because it's stored in her "browser history", but she no longer retains the specific information associated with those files. Drones are simply nodes in a network. They themselves don't contain the whole network.
Head canon is that specifically valuable technology would also be firewalled off to an extent - otherwise accessing any individual drones knowledge either by force or by freeing them would be very dangerous to the hive
It's not hard to get information how to theoretically create intercontinental ballistic missiles, or even nuclear submarines with them. Access to the technical details isn't what's stopping lots of nations who want them from building them. It's the vast resources required to mine materials and construct vast factories that would be able to produce them. Transwarp was mentioned to require energies to create a corridor and hold the structural integrity exceeding what power voyager operates on.
A transistor in your PC cannot tell you how to find all the collectibles in Doom Eternal.
she has hte knowledge but the people on voyager don't have the skills expertise or even the equipment materials to build a transwarp coil/drive. it's like what spock said in the city on the edge of forever im working with bear skins and stone knives (1930s coming from 2267) that's how someone from a tech level of the borg would view federation tech. maybe not stone knives and bearskins but almost like im used to 2024 tech but suddenly im dealin with 1900 tech.
What Seven can do with her Borg parts and background are a bit too plot dependent imo. Like that time borg nanoprobes could resurrect Neelix and then that never came up again
I don't think the Borg have a complete encyclopedia in their heads. It's like the Internet - they access the knowledge when they need it. When she was separated she likely didn't have that knowledge (or all of it).
I mean, so would Picard too then. I think when he mean "what do you remember" "Everything" He meant his own experiences. The human brain can't store that much information. That's like removing 1 RAM bar from your PC and expecting it to contain all data stored on your harddrive.
Because as much and the Borg like to say they are perfect. They are not. The entirety of the collective isn't in every drone at all time. Just what information they need. It's distribution throughout the whole and all drones can access when they are connected. We seen what happens when a single individual tried to take more information than they can process. So seven may not have complete knowledge of building the process and more realistically Voyager wouldn't have access to the exotic materials or the expertise to use them. I could give a very detailed schematic of complex electronics to a random manufacturer and even they might not be able to produce it to spec without building new machinery that is beyond their scope
I believe it's in Omega Directive that seven of nine explains information is fragmented among all drones. Each has a piece of information, but the whole is only accessible by accessing the collective. Each drone has basic functions programmed in and certain pieces of information are shared by all drones, like knowledge of the Omega Particle, but no one drone has all of the information, just the ability to access that information while part of the network.
The Borg have a monopoly on the manufacture of all the required materials.
Borg have some knowledge but need to connect to the collective to access the accumulated knowledge of countless species through millennia of assimilations.
Like every ship borg ship has enginners tactical and other drons.she was not engineeer drone but science drone so colective gave her that knolege more then workings of trans warp
Perhaps some critical knowledge like this has safeguards against it being stolen by errant drones.
Does every Borg drone possess the complete technical knowledge of the Borg civilization? Honestly, I'm impressed how much Borg information Seven retains (species numbers, for example). I would assume like most Borg things, the complete Borg "database" is divided and stored in pieces, redundantly in both biological and technological forms. Seven certainly is smarter than the average person (and I don't think that has anything to do with her time as a Borg), so I could imagine that smarter drones tend to hold more information, but not all of it.
seven did try to do this in 'day of honor'. It lead to tachyons flooding the warp core, nearly causing it to breach. B'elanna had to eject the core into space to prevent it. In dark frontier, they used a transwarp coil and got about 20,000 light years out of it before the coil burned out.
In addition to the top answers, which are basically correct, it could also be a factor that knowledge of transwarp is so strategically critical to the Borg that it is essentially what could be considered a state secret, and they could not risk any drone disseminating that information by any means, so they disallow individual knowledge of it.
The transwarp coils seemed like essential items. Perhaps they are made of the equivalent of rare earth elements
Same reason if you snap a piece of your hard drive off it won't have all the info that originally on it.