Warp Drive - Slingshot Effect

Slingshot Effect

A curious extension of warp travel which has been shown throughout Star Trek is the "Slingshot Effect". First discovered accidentally in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967), one of the earlier episodes of the original Star Trek series, it is a method of time travel. Whereas the actual procedure is intentionally obscure, it involved traveling at a high warp velocity (depicted in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to be over warp 9.8) in the direction of a star, on a precisely calculated "slingshot" path; if successful, the ship is caused to travel to a desired point, past or future. The same technique was used later in the episode "Assignment: Earth" (1968) for historic research — in this episode, the warp factor required for "time warp" is given the name "light speed breakaway factor." The term "time warp" was first used in "The Naked Time" (1966) when a previously untried cold-start intermix of matter and antimatter threw the Enterprise back three days in time. The term was later used in Star Trek IV in describing the slingshot effect. The technique was mentioned as a viable method of time travel in the TNG episode "Time Squared" (1989).

This 'slingshot' effect has been explored in theoretical physics: it is hypothetically possible to slingshot oneself 'around' the event horizon of a black hole. The result of such a maneuver would cause time to pass at a faster rate, relative to the ship within the event horizon. Such a journey would, unfortunately, be a 'one-way' trip into the future — the pilot of the craft would not have 'traveled through time' in the classical sense, but would instead have merely 'fast forwarded' through the intervening years. Travel in entropic directions other than forwards remain impossible to ascertain within the rubric of Special relativity, but the "Time Warp" drive seen in "The Cage" (TOS) may explain some of the issues.

Fans of the show and films have noted that the Slingshot involves a star, rather than a black hole, and the most normal consensus from its use concerns the nature of warp travel and warp velocities. A black hole is noteworthy for its singularity and associated event horizon, where not even light possesses escape velocity. Warp-drive and other transluminal vehicles would however be able to escape a black hole event horizon, as they are capable of speeds greater than c. Stars do not possess an event horizon, as their escape velocities are considerably lower than those of black holes. They do however have very great masses. A vessel able to move at transluminal velocities would then be able to take advantage of relativistic physics: interaction with the mass of non-black hole stellar mass at transluminal velocities is very similar to the interaction between a subluminal vessel and a black hole event horizon, in terms of relativistic boundary interactions and equivalence of energy. A warp-ship, then, is able to perform as its own 'event-horizon' when interacting with a stellar mass.