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

The Borg's taste for geometric design continued in Star Trek: First Contact with the introduction of the Borg sphere. In fact, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore's first draft script had the sphere participating separately alongside a Borg cube and, indeed, "Borg vessels" plural in the battle with the Federation. Of course, in the version that made it to theatres, the sphere appears only briefly, rapidly dispatched by a volley of quantum torpedoes, its debris left hanging around for the 22nd century to deal with. Carry out what you followed in, Captain!

When it came to creating the look of the Borg sphere for the movie, John Eaves, who also gave us the design of the Enterprise-E, noted in the Design Matrix special feature that a point was made in particular to avoid any evocations of a certain celestial orb of doom from another franchise. Eaves even took "the big Star Wars book" to the producers' office to demonstrate that spheres were "something big in the sci-fi world."

Producers didn't seem overly concerned, however, but with Episode I already in the works, Eaves and team decided to distinguish their Borg sphere from the Death Star by creating a shape with "deep facets" that was "more like sections of an apple cut with big open cores on either end."

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine design legend Ricardo Delgado was also invited to submit proposals for First Contact, one of which, in Eaves' words in Design Matrix was a giant "flying Washington Monument" type ship as a very unique alternative to the Borg cube.