Oh, undoubtedly 

I personally would attribute the Borg being damaged in the first confrontation to the fact that it was "pre-adaptation"... but that seems hardly sufficient to explain the intensity of the damage in spite of armor, decentralized systems, etc

about the enterprise firing a energypulse from the deflector dish, and not doing damage to the borg. i thought that it didn't do damage because picard was assimilated, and that gave the cube the ability to counter the weapon

Whee, my debut post! I hope I don't make a total fool of myself. >_>

Yeah, Borg technology has always been a bit hard to define, to say the least. We go from having a cube requiring to travel for a few years at warp speed to reach the Federation to, later on, having this big portal network that seems to deposit them on Starfleet's front door between commercials, and a powerful transwarp conduit on every ship. (Which was probably hinted at in the TNG episode where the rogue Borg had the ship with the hyper-fast propulsion drive.) Even their interior decoration sense changed, going from this well-lit room with the Borg symbol scattered everywhere to an interior that would be somewhat appropriate in a high-tech Evil Dead film. (Am I the only one who wants to see the chainsaw/boomstick wielding hero mix it up with drones? ;.; ) Being creepy should be 'irrelevant,' after all.

And just because Voyager succeeded in 'plugging in' a coil to their ship for a bit of a speed boost doesn't mean they'd necessarily know HOW the coil works. I mean, they apparently couldn't even keep it from wearing out. Part of the reason they might not have been able to simply scan it in detail and program those details into a replicator might have been that the coil relied upon materials they couldn't recreate,  (consider that latinum can't be replicated,) or even components that operated in more than three dimensions.

And I agree that Voyager downplayed the Borg considerably; how can a race that went from half destroyed by a single phaser shot to all but invincible because of adaptation fail to adapt to one measly little Intrepid class starship?

Well, there are two possible reasons for this.

First of all, the Borg, as a race driven by logic and, to an extent, mathematics, might have calculated based on their encounter with the Enterprise that a singular cube was all that would be required to assimilate the population. In fact, this calculation was correct, for if it was not for a bit of luck and trickery, they WOULD have managed to assimilate Earth. This would be consistent with their line of thinking; in the end, Earth falling wouldn't singlehandedly destroy the Federation, although the loss of life and faculties would be a significant blow. But, as the Borg have a single, central weakness, they perceive their opponents to possess the same flaw. For this reason, they aim for what they feel in the 'core' of the opposition, perhaps thinking that it will break the back of all resistance.

Anyway, this would explain the first attack in TNG. The attack in First Contact was, again, carried out via a single cube, possibly because the Borg were still operating under the assumption that, without the strategy that had defeated them last time, the humans would fall.


The second reason could be explained by the very idea of 'Borg Space.' It would suggest that their primary force of expansion is outwards from a central point, rather than scattered across the galaxy. If they find a potentially intriguing bit of technology, they might send a cube to attempt assimilation, but it wouldn't be their utmost priority as the Borg are likely a patient race, and believe they will eventually reach the target anyway. It's not like the Federation is going anywhere, and because the Borg are so confident in their superiority, the idea that waiting might result in Starfleet exceeding them in technological ability is entirely absent from their thinking processes.

  You know you're destined to be a psychology major when you start picking apart the Borg. >_>;;;

Not necessarily; Borg technology seems to possess inherent flaws, such as a vulnerability to higher EM bands, and in the end there have been things they were unable to adapt to. Species 8472 used biologically based technology, forcing the Borg to confront something unlike anything they had ever seen before. As the Borg seem to lack the ability to create brand new strategies and technologies, ( even their adaptation being, really, a use of their accumulated knowledge to deal with different situations) then theoretically something that is both capable of resisting Borg nanoprobes and which has the advantage of being something the Borg had never dealt with before.

Another strategy that would be successful is attempting to disrupt the frequency through which the Borg communicate; even being able to isolate a single vessel from the collective would effectively cripple it. Then there's the pathogen used in Voyager in two separate episodes, including the series finale, which was a substance the Borg either did not have the time to adapt to, or simply didn't know how.

It's true that just building bigger phasers probably won't get the Federation very far, since they'd still be relying on a technology base that the Borg have learned to counter, but it doesn't mean that they won't find a way to defeat them; after all, humans have irrational leaps of intuition and brilliance driven by sheer desperation. =P