Ricardo Delgado, another [Star Trek: Deep Space 9] veteran, had been asked to take a look at the Borg themselves. In his spare time, he threw out a couple of designs for their ships. His designs for the Borg Queen and her drones were heavily influenced by the ancient Egyptians, so he suggested that the still-undefined larger ship should be an obelisk with the sphere set into the top. His version of the sphere was also radically different to anything seen before: one half would be made up of traditional Borg panels, but the other half would be a forcefield that contained gaseous energy, which the sphere used for fuel.

Meanwhile, John Eaves was producing his own designs for the larger Borg ship. His first drawing was of a large, rectangular ship, rather like an enormous Borg brick.

The first one I did was very, very smooth; that was when it was still very large. It was this reflective block and it had all these inset passageways you could fly through or things could fly out of. They said, 'OK, that's kind of cool. Let's carry that a little bit further, but not so smooth; we need that Borg detail.'"

However, back then Borg detail was not clearly defined. The original model of the cube had only been designed for television and could never have stood up to a cinematic presentation. According to John Eaves, it was essentially made up of model trees, i.e. the bits of plastic that are left behind when one assembles a model kit. Therefore he had to design the detail himself. This did not mean he had to draw every individual hatch and panel.

John Eaves: "I knew how John [Goodson] was going to work on the model - they were going to use brass etch, and there's really no way you can draw it - so what I did was just a guideline for the kind of shapes. I try to do that with all the drawings I do; I leave a lot of spaces open so the modeller can be part of the creative process. The next design's got very lateral planes and a very uniform shape. They liked the idea of the detailing on it; it had ribbon-shaped canyons. They liked the feel of that, but they felt that the pattern was too mathematical."

John Eaves concentrated on breaking up the design of the ship and avoiding any kind of regular pattern.

That was also rectangular, but it's got a lot of really deep valleys and its got a little round escape sphere on the surface. That one they really liked; they said 'Let's go with that.' They sat with it for a week or so, then they came back and said, 'We're going to go with the cube shape."'

Throughout the design process, the size of the ships kept changing. The relative sizes of the sphere and the larger ship stayed the same. At one point the, sphere was 3,000 feet across, which meant that the 'mother ship' was "gargantuan". The final version of the sphere was only 1,500 feet across, which made it considerably smaller than the Enterprise-E. The point is that the changing size of the ships had a major impact on the kind of detail John Eaves was putting on his designs. When the ship was enormous, he made the detail much smaller to create a sense of scale. When it was smaller, he brought the size of the detail up.

When he drew his first Borg cube, it was supposed to be vast, so the surface was filled with detail. As John says, nobody really liked the look of this cube.

"The first one was really overly detailed. That's where I started incorporating 45-degree lines all through it. They liked that; it was very intricate, but it was too busy, so they had me go with version two. That has the same breakup; I started putting a heavier panel on top of it and incorporating the escape hatch. That was more the direction they were wanting, so Herman [Zimmerman] had me do a color pass on it. That one has the hatch on the left-hand side; for the very final pass they had me do, they had me put the hatch on the right side and they went back to a little finer detail. It was almost going back in a full circle back to the first sketch. It had a little bit of the heavier panel but more of the fine-scale stuff."

The hatch the sphere emerges from is easily identifiable on his drawings but this was not the case in the movie, when the sphere emerged from a concealed hangar. The change was actually made while the model was being constructed.

"As the model went on, they decided to keep the door hidden, so it wouldn't be seen during the attack and wouldn't be revealed until the very last moment. On all the drawings you can see where the port is; that established where on the cube that hatch is, but, in fact, you never saw it except for that one scene where it opens, so really it could be anywhere."

Since the sphere made its debut, it has been seen several times in [Star Trek: Voyager] e.g. the crew mount Operation Fort Knox against one in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier], one is seen crashlanding at the start of [Survival Instinct], a sphere is summoned by One in [#96 Drone], a sphere threatens Iceb in [Child's Play], and USS Voyager flies out of the debris of a sphere into the Alpha Quadrant in [#171 and #172 Endgame]. [Star Trek: First Contact] pushed back the boundaries that had kept the look of the Borg fleet to that of the cube, and since then we have seen spheres, a diamond-shaped ship for the Borg Queen in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier], a small oblong ship in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier] and the heavily-armoured tactical cube in [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero].

above 4 screenshots from [#171 and #172 Endgame]

In the nebula, Voyager narrowly avoids collision with a Borg cube. (pop-up window) [#171 and #172 Endgame]