- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It's also pretty telling that Worf was about to ram the cube with the Defiant in the Battle of Sector 001. He's a Klingon, he thinks of things like that fairly readily; a lot of Starfleet officers might honestly not think of ramming attacks except as a last resort- by which point their ships may not be in condition to do so.
At Wolf 359 it's reasonable to conclude that the Cube would just have taken any individual ship attempting a ram and blown it out of space entirely.
In general, full-sized starships are so expensive that even if they're cheaper than the things you ram them into, most military planners won't really have that relentless an attritional mindset towards them. To be fully functional as starships they have to have so much equipment and for practical purposes require a large enough crew that blowing one up can't be a "no big deal" experience. You may accept losing a few in a battle, but there's a natural psychological reluctance to develop tactics that involve blowing up ten billion dollar assets (as it were) to kill an enemy's thirty billion dollar assets. Especially if success isn't guaranteed.
Have you seen any indication that the Vulcans and Betazoids are doing anything other than starting to adopt Federation ship designs voluntarily despite their economic costs? They might at some future date, but it's equally plausible that they'll continue to expand their budget and assets to allow them to keep building our ships, especially as long as we continue to offer designs like the Kepler and Constellation-A in the one-megaton class.
If so, then the member fleets are just going to have to conform to Starfleet's design doctrines, or they're actually going to have to communicate this need of their to us directly. If they want us to do the work of designing their ships for them, and they want us to design ships we can't use for them, then they need to contact us directly, rather than passive-aggressively waiting around for us to do it spontaneously.
But that doesn't mean we should go around designing ships we have no intention of using, purely on spec that an unspecified member world fleet might want them.
At Wolf 359 or at the Battle of Sector 001? You need to clearly differentiate between the two fights.
At Wolf 359 the Federation's anti-Borg tactics are still in their infancy and the Cube seems highly effective at isolating and pulverizing individual Federation ships while laughing at their weapons. It doesn't help that via Locutus, they probably have expert knowledge of what it looks like when a Starfleet ship prepares a ramming attack.
At Sol, the anti-Borg tactics and weapons are better developed, but by the very nature of that, they have much more hope of defeating the Cube by conventional means. Since ramming is NOT guaranteed to work (see below) and since squadrons of ships launching conventional attacks seem to be making a solid impression and considerable damage, I can see the Federation sticking to a doctrine that involves fairly conventional ship attacks, and not resorting to exotic desperation maneuvers. At least, not as overall fleet doctrine.
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Furthermore, in both cases, the Borg cube has highly effective tractors (capable of casually immobilizing a Galaxy) and extreme firepower. Individual ramming ships would almost certainly get picked out form the mass. They could then be blown apart while being held at bay with tractor beams (or rather, their cousins the pressor beam, which is the traditional term for a tractor set to 'push' instead of 'pull').
So unless the Federation decides to have entire squadrons of ships ram the Cube at once, it's not going to work out for them unless they get marvelously lucky. And it would be very out of character for the Federation high command to order entire squadrons of ships to ram an enemy all at once. That's the kind of decision individual captains might take for themselves... but as noted above, individual actions along those lines aren't likely to be very effective.
I don't think technobabble is really required.
