Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Borg

In space, no one can hear you streamline. To that end, Maurice Hurley's original script for Q Who gave the following description of the purely pragmatic Borg ship as it first appeared on the Enterprise-D viewscreen:

It's box like, with none of the aerodynamic qualities associated with most spaceships including the Enterprise. This is a case of form following function.

According to The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, to create what became the iconic Borg cube based on Hurley's imaginings, "embellishments" were added by designers Rick Sternbach and Richard James, and the task of building the studio model was then given to company Starlight Effects, under the supervision of Next Gen visual effects artists Dan Curry and Ron Moore. Along with the large studio model, which was also used in Emissary, a smaller model of the Borg cube was built for the explosive ending of The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.

Much like the drones within it, the Borg cube had had some work done for Star Trek: First Contact. In an interview for the First Contact DVD extra Design Matrix, illustrator John Eaves revealed the evolution of his Borg ship designs for the film — at first more cuboid in shape before evolving back into a cube proper. In general, the Borg cube in First Contactwas more finely detailed and more compact than the television version, with the added component of the hatch for the Borg sphere. The model itself was built by Industrial Light & Magic. For Voyager, the switch was made to CGI models, including that of the tactical cube which first appeared in Unimatrix Zero.