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Tumblr post by arctic-hands:
When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll “Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?”. Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly “Borg Cube”, but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.
So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said “Death Star”.
So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.
Reply from evilsoup:
An image depicting the story of the "Judgment of Solomon", where Solomon is labelled "stargate fandom", and the two women are labelled "star trek fandom" and "star wars fandom". The Star Wars lady is standing grumpily with her hands on her hips, while the Star Trek woman gestures with open arms. Between the two of them, on the floor, is a baby in a wicker basket. Solomon sits over them in judgment.
It's specifically the size of a small moon, remember that the Earth's moon is actually pretty large, 5th largest in our solar system and by a pretty good margin the largest in comparison to the planet it orbits, just in our own solar system we have Deimos at only about 6KM, and in other parts of the universe I'm sure they could be even smaller, in our own solar system Jupiter pretty regularly captures small asteroids into its orbit that could be considered temporary moons.
From the various wikis and such, the death stars were about 120 (1st death star) and 160 (2nd) km in diameter, so 60 and 80 in radius, so still significantly larger than a cube, but far less so than the 1000km you're thinking.
And size doesn't necessarily correlate to how much power they have at their disposal or how much they can absorb/deflect. Their weapons/shields are probably based on very different technologies, it could be like comparing a Davy Crockett nuke (basically the real-life equivalent of a fallout mini nuke) to an equivalent sized bomb made of black powder, or like an inch thick plate of steel to the same sized sheet of plywood.
And the death star crew was much larger, somewhere around 2 million people plus a few hundred thousand maintenance droids. Those humans need a lot more space and creature comforts than the Borg who just need alcoves to recharge in. I'm sure that they weren't exactly providing luxury accomodations for most of the rank-and-file grunts and contractors and such, but they certainly got more space than the Borg need, plus dining halls, kitchens, medical bays, recreation areas, meeting rooms, offices, throne rooms, detention levels, etc. a lot of things the Borg have little or no use for. The Borg may be able to dedicate more space on the cube to weapons and shields than the death star could.