Borg Ship Classes

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1. The tactical cube was intentionally laid out by Doug Drexler as a standard cube with additional hull plating as shown in Star Trek: The Magazine (October 2000). Visual evidence from VOY: "Unimatrix Zero" supports the assumption that it is of the same size as a 3km cube variant 2.
2. It seems unusual that the Borg would give this ship type, unlike all others, such a specific designation, which is why I think "Class-4 tactical cube" is rather a Federation classification.

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1. The cube variant 1 could be seen in TNG: "Q Who" and "The Best of Both Worlds". The physical model of the cube was made of whatever material was available, mostly trees left over from model kits. This is why it appears as a maze of pipes when we look closely, visually very different from the later Voyager cubes (variant 2). Variant 1 also seems to be larger in most shots.
2. It is possible that the cubes in the two TNG episodes were actually the same, as Data could not find any identification markers.
3. Although it was never mentioned on screen, it has been suggested that a cube may grow as new technology and new drones are assimilated. This would ultimately explain all the size differences. In particular, it would explain why the cube (variant 1), after a longer journey through the Beta and Alpha Quadrants, may be so much larger than variant 2 that we see in the Delta Quadrant. On the other hand, this would render any attempt to classify Borg ships futile as they would be extended and modified in a chaotic fashion.
4. In TNG: "Q Who", when the first Borg cube appeared, the vessel's external structure could regenerate after much of it had been destroyed by the Enterprise's weapons. All Borg vessels since "The Best of Both Worlds" seemed to lack the ability of fast regeneration, but they were much harder to damage in the first place.
5. The opening sequence of "Star Trek: First Contact" shows a flashback of Picard's time as Locutus aboard the Borg cube. The visuals created for this scene would fit better into a spherical hull than into a cube. The scene was reused for the interior of the sphere in VOY: "Drone", suggesting that the two are identical. We may speculate that the big cube in "Best of Both Worlds" had a sphere just like the smaller one in "First Contact". This would also explain how the Queen and some drones (as mentioned in VOY: "Unity") could escape, although sensors on Earth and on the Enterprise should have picked up the sphere's departure. The larger size of the sphere seen in "Drone", compared to most other spheres seen on Voyager, goes along nicely with the fact that the shown interior would require a larger sphere anyway.

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1. In contrast to variant 1, the cubes seen since "First Contact" and Voyager are chunkier and less "transparent", as they have a hull plating with 45-degree angles. This could point to an upgrade or a new class of cubes. However, in VOY: "Dark Frontier", the Hansens ran into a Voyager-style cube already a decade prior to TNG. Since the TNG cubes may be considerably larger, while the differences between the "First Contact" (physical) and Voyager (CGI) cubes are less obvious, it may be useful to distinguish only two types. Actually, on a diagram in VOY: "Scorpion, Part I" it looks indeed like there are supposed to exist exactly two different sizes of cubes.
2. Only the cube in "First Contact" was ever seen or mentioned to release a sphere. Considering how many cubes were blown up without survivors in Voyager, for instance by Species 8472, it is possible that only few cubes are actually equipped with the "lifeboat" sphere.
3. The size results from the internal volume of 28 cubic kilometers mentioned in VOY: "Dark Frontier", yielding a length of 3040m. The size chart for "First Contact" in Star Trek: The Magazine (March 2001) shows the cube at 9000ft = 2743m. The difference is small enough to postulate that there is actually only one size of variant 2.
4. The crew size of 129,000 is stated for the cube encountered by the Raven (VOY: "Dark Frontier"), while the visually identical Cube 630 (VOY: "Unimatrix Zero") has a drone complement of 64,000. It is possible that the first number includes newly assimilated drones.

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1. The main difference to previously seen Borg cubes is that variant 3 features big channels in its outer hull. It looks like these were part of the original design and not carved into the ship after it was captured by the Romulans. Other, more irregular parts missing from the surface look like damage or scavenging. Other than that, the surface is very much like that of a variant-2 cube. The size may be the same as well.
2. The Borg cube repairs itself a bit like the one first encountered by the Enterprise in TNG: "Q Who". We may argue that the "old" Borg cube too had something like repair drones, rather than being made of self-bending metal.
3. This Borg cube is equipped with a sphere, like the one in "First Contact".

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1. The huge spiky cube can be seen in PIC: "Vox" and "The Last Generation". It arrived in the Sol system through a transwarp conduit that led straight into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
2. Size according to a Twitter post by @esdi.

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1. Jurati's Borg ship can be seen in PIC: "The Star Gazer" and "Farewell". After the latter episode, the Borg Queen aka Jurati asks for provisional membership of her collective in the Federation. This likely doesn't include all other Borg.
2. The design is by Dave Blass and John Eaves, modeled by James Chung. According to the size chart for PIC season 2, the diameter is 10.16 kilometers.
3. On the size chart, the vessel is simply labeled as "Borg ship". In social media posts by Dave Blass, it was referred to as "Singularity ship" or as "Singularity", the latter insinuating this could be a name. Neither a name nor a more precise classification was mentioned on screen though.

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1. The larger type of spheres appeared in VOY: "Drone", identified as "long-range tactical vessel" by Seven. Sphere 634 that followed Voyager into the transwarp channel may have been that large too. Sphere 878, ordered to self-destruct by the Queen in "Unimatrix Zero", had a crew complement of 11,000, which points to quite a large size as well. 
2. As suggested above, a sphere similar in size and structure to the long-range tactical vessel may have been aboard the cube variant 1 as a lifeboat in TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds".

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1. The smaller sphere first appeared in "First Contact". Most spheres seen on Voyager seem to be of this smaller type too, in particular the ones in VOY: "Survival Instinct" and "Unimatrix Zero". Although the models are visually identical, the size difference to variant 1 is considerable.
2. Most visual evidence would support a diameter of 1500ft (=457m), as depicted in Star Trek: The Magazine (March 2001), which also goes along with the size chart for "First Contact". In ENT: "Regeneration" the diameter was estimated to be 600m, based on the radius of the wreckage.

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1. The sphere is visible inside the cube in PIC: "Broken Pieces" and "Et in Arcadia Ego I".
2. We can't see the sphere in its entirety. It is well possible that there is no difference between variants 2 and 3. The relative scaling is much like in "First Contact". If Borg cube variant 3 measures 3 kilometers (just like variant 2), then the sphere is 450 meters across (just like variant 2).

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