They say humans' love of replicators and root beer makes them weak and soft.
Nah. As Quark once observed, replicators and root beer is what keeps humans docile and agreeable. Take away their creature comforts and back them into a corner, and they get mad and start blowing up planets, and nobody wants that.
So whatever you do, don't break the replicators!
Bear in mind, by the way, that Starfleet has at least one weapon that destroys planets in one shot: the Genesis device.
The Federation treaty that prohibits it from developing cloaking devices exists for a reason: a ship with a Genesis torpedo and a cloak could destroy any other power's homeworld at will with no warning.
That is terrifying.
If not for the treaty, every power in the galaxy would start a desperate all-out war against the Federation to stop it from doing that.
Oh, and the one time some humans decided to violate the treaty and make a cloak anyway, they made the phasing cloak, which makes a ship not merely invisible but able to *hide inside planets*.
They could leave behind a Genesis device on every homeworld, buried under kilometers of rock, and detonate it whenever they please.
#StarTrek humans are f**king scary, man. Good thing they're such goody-two-shoes all the time, or everybody else (except Q and the Borg) would be COOKED.
Wait no, the Borg are already cooked.
I forgot about this, but a few years after the humans' first encounter with the Borg, they developed an infovirus that would wipe the Borg out…and decided not to use it because they *took pity on the Borg.*
Then a rogue human admiral decided “screw that” and wiped them out anyway.
Then, a few decades later, the Borg's last, barely-functional cube got cored by a human starship…from a museum.
Did I mention #StarTrek humans are scary? Because yeah.
The human starship did have two ludicrously competent non-human pilots take turns at the helm, to be fair.
And also one Klingon who thinks it's fun to fight the Borg with a ludicrously heavy sword. Because of course he does.
@argv_minus_one I have to note I've gotten really tired of them absolutely definitely having completely defeated the Borg for good, only for them to come right back.
"Oh, the Borg queen, who had total control over the Borg, was the last survivor, and she just applied for membership in the Federation."
Next episode: "We're fighting the Borg again."
I said they're cooked, not extinct. The Borg are very very hard to wipe out completely for the same reason bacteria are: even one survivor can rebuild the Collective, new queen and all.
Anyway, I know of at least three different Borg queens:
1. First Contact queen. Died, but the Collective remained otherwise unscathed and made a new one.
2. Voyager queen. Horribly crippled by Janeway in the Voyager ending. Came back in Picard with what little is left of the Collective. Exploded along with her ship.
3. Picard season 2 queen. Last Borg survivor in an alternate timeline. Convinced by Jurati that she's doomed if she doesn't change her ways. Joined the Federation.
Of note is that queen #3 was convinced of such by Jurati *after* having assimilated Jurati.
This turned Jurati into a nagging voice in the queen's head, apparently with access to the queen's enormous mental faculties, whereupon Jurati calculated that the Borg *always lose* in *every single timeline*.
Sometimes they lose to the Federation, sometimes they wipe out the Federation only to lose to someone else, but they always, inevitably, lose.
@argv_minus_one
Don't forget, a plan (from a Terran, but approved by Starfleet command) was exactly that: "leave a weapon of mass destruction inside the Klingon homeworld near a bunch of fault lines or whatever so that we can threaten to set it off and blow up the whole planet". Used as a negotiating tactic to get the Klingons to end the war. Unsurprisingly, it worked, and didn't leave the Klingons that friendly towards Starfleet afterwards.
That was a couple of decades BEFORE they invented the Genesis device.
ARGVMI~1.PIF
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