Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The Borg Cube You Need To Know

Since that Doug Drexler quote brought it up, let's briefly touch on the Borg cube's counterpart, the Borg sphere...

Apparently an extension of the Borg's affinity for basic geometric shapes, the Borg sphere was initially described in the screenplay for Star Trek: First Contact as a "warship" before essentially fulfilling the function of a lifeboat for the Borg Queen in the finished film. While the filming model itself was nearly the same size as the movie's Borg cube miniature, the Borg sphere is actually intended to be only a fraction of the cube's size – roughly 600 meters in diameter to the cube's 3,000 meters.

A vestige of its early description as warship, the Borg sphere was designed by John Eaves to include a large, circular weapon prominently placed on its hull. But the ship's resulting resemblance to Star Wars' Death Star concerned production designer Herman Zimmerman and the ILM model shop which was working on Star Trek: First Contact and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace simultaneously. Later versions of the sphere reduced the prominence of the round weapon and introduced numerous raised surfaces, which gave the sphere an appearance that John Eaves likened to a sliced apple.

For its dramatic departure from the exploding Borg ship in First Contact's Battle of Sector 001, a motion-control hatch and five-inch deep passageway was built into the Borg cube filming model and the Borg sphere was composited in. This was later referenced in Star Trek: Picard, when a Borg sphere could be seen docked to the side of the Artifact in the episode "Broken Pieces".

Despite its introduction in Star Trek: First Contact as a secondary vehicle to the Borg cube mothership, the Borg sphere actually went on to rival the cube, showing up in a total of eleven episodes of the various spin-off series.