> In the movie you saw(you did see?) that the total intregration of the
 > organic lifeform was complete and far more better than anything the Borg
 > has shown to be the case so far. In that regard, the Borg is either a
 > throw-back or simply orginated from another source. To try to converge
 > what was in the V'ger saga and that of the Borg is stretching it abit.
 > The V'ger firepower and how it seems to be decades beyond any Borg
 > technology, plus the likely intelligence gathered was sent back to the
 > machine homeworld centuries before the Borg appeared. You would think
 > they come to the rescue long before that to understand how they were
 > defeated or the mission failed to find the true creator. -_-_-Bill
   Sorry, but I don't agree.  Yes, I did see the movie, and have read the
book.  V'ger's goal, as explained by Spock, was to "merge with the creator",
which it finally did by the "digitizing" of Will Decker (the Decker family
must have an underlying death wish; Commodore Matt Decker, Will's father,
also "sacrificed" himself by flying into the mouth of the Doomsday Device).
    It is completely possible that the electromagnetic merging of
Decker/V'ger was deduced to be insufficient to accomplish all that the
machine planet had set into motion inside V'ger.  That the only way to
completely merge was on both the electromagnetic (ie brain wave patterns)
and the physical combined.  Only then could the whole essence of what the
creator was/is could be experienced, and its quite probable that Decker,
originally a *physical* being was the portion of the merged mind that
implanted this *prime directive*.
     As for "firepower", V'ger NEVER destroyed anything:  the energy bolts
it projected did not destroy ships in the conventional sence, instead these
bolts "digitized" each entity for data storage -- " learn all that is
learnable and record it, then record it for merging with the creator"
     It could easily be the Decker influence that turns the digitizing bolts
into energy weapons, shields, etc.
     We can also assume that V'ger had transwarp capability; after the
merging it disappeared in a flash that was never explained.  After that
merging it is easily possible that a transwarp conduit direct to the delta
quadrant and "home" was set up and V'ger/Decker was there in almost an
instant.
 * AmyBW v2.14 *
... Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
--- AmyBW/MaxBlue 1.0
(1:387/721)
---------------