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

One of the more exciting scenes in Star Trek: Picard's first season takes place in "Broken Pieces" in which Seven of Nine resurrects the Artifact. As the derelict Borg cube powers back up after 16 years of dormancy, hundreds of bug-like robotic drones swarm over the ship's hull and repair damaged sections.

Of course that scene in "Broken Pieces" wasn't the first time a Borg ship was depicted as repairing itself and was an updated version of a sequence from the Borg's very first episode, "Q Who". In that episode, after receiving heavy damage from a volley of photon torpedoes fired by the Enterprise-D, the Borg cube is seen mending itself; tubes and conduits miraculously healing by themselves.

Without the benefit of modern CGI, the VFX team on Star Trek: The Next Generation achieved the effect of the Borg cube's regeneration practically.

Using a large-scale model of a section of the Borg cube (built by Kim Baily and Starlight Effects), TNG's VFX department added wax and styrene parts onto the ship's hull. Filming the model in closeup, the team then used a heat gun to melt those wax and styrene sections, then reversed the footage in post production to create the illusion that the parts were un-melting and healing.