Borg cube mass.

[scvn2812 504]

I was going to bring that up as well but not until I had a chance to look up how much weight granite and the like can support

[scvn2812 504]

The Borg may use some sort of smart material that they can tweak the properties of on the fly but they also have all manner of fields as well. The hull is not likely their main line of defense. Also In the Best of Both Worlds, Borg ships were shown to be faster than a Galaxy class red lining it's engines, the First Contact battle was probably a series of fights like BOBW with various task forces intercepting the cube along its flight path or catching up when it drops out of warp for any reason rather than hours upon hours of constant fighting and bombardment. Trek ships can't take more than a few seconds from a peer in most fights without taking crippling damage, the longest ship to ship battles take a few minutes.

[Khas 12,158]

I think that's the case in most sci-fi space battles, though.

[scvn2812 504]

The pacing or the materials being buffed by exotic fields and the like? Either way, agreed. There's only so much time you can spend having bits blown off your ship before you have to try to break off and make repairs. Same goes for Coruscant in all likelihood, it only took five or six minutes of screen time for an ISD to bite it so there were probably discrete engagements and withdrawals for that fight too.

Edited April 14, 2013 by scvn2812

[Tyralak 12,068]

The Borg may use some sort of smart material that they can tweak the properties of on the fly but they also have all manner of fields as well. The hull is not likely their main line of defense. Also In the Best of Both Worlds, Borg ships were shown to be faster than a Galaxy class red lining it's engines, the First Contact battle was probably a series of fights like BOBW with various task forces intercepting the cube along its flight path or catching up when it drops out of warp for any reason rather than hours upon hours of constant fighting and bombardment. Trek ships can't take more than a few seconds from a peer in most fights without taking crippling damage, the longest ship to ship battles take a few minutes.

 

Well, how far is the Romulan Neutral Zone from Earth? It's not exactly around the corner, and that's where the Enterprise was when the battle started. The battle had to be going on for at least that long.

[scvn2812 504]

Emphasis on the word "constant." A Galaxy-class has to red line its engines to keep pace with a Borg Cube and even then its iffy. When you combine that with no ship we've ever seen being able to take more than a few minutes of fighting with a peer, let alone a superior opponent (Ref: Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, Nemesis) before having to break off and make repairs or exploding and more often than not, losing shields in less than a minute, this is not the stuff of an hours long continuous fight.

 

This, and other "hours long" battles, likely represents a "battle" with several separate engagements spread out across the duration of the battle punctuated by ships breaking off to repair, reform and plan the next attack. In the case of the battle with the Borg, given the limitations of warp drive when trying to run down a Cube and the lack of any reason for the Borg to stick around if the prize is Earth and they've been met with a force that could potentially overcome them, the Cube was likely attacked multiple times by multiple fleets, starting with the fleet in the Typhon sector, tearing through it or leaving it in its dust, possibly encountering other fleets along the way and then running into another fleet at Sol. We don't know where the Typhon Sector is, but it could be further away than the the Romulan border, allowing the E-E to arrive in Sol in time to save the day.

 

So I see it more of a battle in the sense of the battles in the Pacific in World War 2 where a series of attacks and retreats by carrier launched aircraft over the course of hours, even days, are counted as a single battle. In other words, the most likely explanation given what we know about the capabilities of the Borg and Federation is a series of attacks, either by pursuing or intercepting ships, over the course of hours or days with the finish line and final, decisive engagement being at Earth.