There’s a quote from Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—when describing the presence of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council’s ships, he wrote: “Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
This quote jumps back into my brain every so often, and looking at Reddit user IngeniousIdiocy’s rendition of the Borg cube from Star Trek in Starfield, it’s rattling around in there again.
Assimilation is Inevitable from r/Starfield
That’s not to say they’re the first. You can’t go five feet hunting for Starfield ship designs without stubbing your toe on a Borg cube—and why not? They’re a science fiction staple, they make a statement, and they’re hard to mess up, being a big box. Though I’m told by Robin Valentine that the game does penalise you the more unwieldy your ship becomes. IngeniousIdiocy agrees, stating in a separate thread: “It has 36 mobility and blocks out the camera, so I’m not keeping it.”
IngeniousIdiocy posted their work in progress earlier this week, though I wasn’t quite sold until I saw the thing take off from the launchpad. It’s a truly unwieldy beast, lurching uneasily before taking off into the night sky like a meteor impact played in reverse. This thing should not move this fast, it shouldn’t even be airborne, and yet it is—efficiency be damned, it’s beautiful. Which is more than can be said for this ungodly hallway abomination, which I can only assume looks like a tetris piece in flight. There’s space in my heart for both, though.
This cube is, unfortunately, not a 1:1 recreation. A bit of research tells me that an episode of Star Trek: Voyager sized these beautiful assimilationary creatures as over three kilometres along an edge, which is something the current ship builder doesn’t allow for obvious reasons.
Todd Howard clearly didn’t want us creating miles-wide weapons of mass destruction in the base game, though determined modders have made Skyrim completely unrecognisable before. There are limits in place right now, sure, but you know what they say—resistance is futile.
