Project Tangent

[varek]

Project Tangent
(This has been transferred from another section. I apologize.) Having read that starships whose warp-engines were out of control could slow themselves down by using gravity wells. Here are a few ideas I have, which I call Project Tangent, related to this:
You could calculate equations for tangentially glancing off a gravity well, or series of gravity wells, and store them in your ship's main computer. For security purposes, you could also store them (separately and independently) in PADDs secured by your ship's senior staff officers, to use in case of damage or sabotage to the other records.
To calculate your ship's mass when fully loaded--including personnel, fuel, cargo, equipment, etc.--Starfleet could develop a standard speed chart that would record the times it takes vehicles to travel a fixed distance at the same sublight speed. Different classes of ships (with various warp-engines) could be timed, to produce an accurate chart. You could then compare your ship's speed over that same distance with other ships, to calculate your ship's mass.
Using this information, you could calculate the proper angles at which to approach a gravity well, to slow down your vessel, in an emergency or a drill.
What do you think?

 

[Finn]

The computer can do this. It doesn't seem worthy of a project.

 

[Timo]

These "low-tech backup" scenarios seem a bit superfluous to the Trek universe in general. If your computer is down, you die - there's no room for toying with manually operated wrenches and rope ladders, pencil-and-ruler calculations or blow-up dolls, or whatever supposedly power-independent, survivable and idiotproof techniques one wants to postulate. Today's fighter planes don't come equipped with a spare set of flappable wings or a sextant, either...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

The only TREK eps I can think of, off the top of my head, where the warp engines run out-of-control would be these:

TOS
"The Changeling" (briefly caused by Nomad)
"That Which Survives" (caused by "Losira"; thwarted by Mr. Scott cutting off the fuel flow)
"Day of the Dove" (caused by alien entity, cured by driving off said entity)

TNG
"Hollow Pursuits" (caused by mistake, cured by addressing affected parts)

ENT
"Affliction" / "Divergence" (caused by Klingon cyber-sabotage, cured by Tripp shutting down the engines)

In none of these stories was a gravity well solution ever mentioned. The source of the problem always seemed to be internal, the result of sabotage or a mistake that results in the ship experiencing a surge of some sort that causes the affected ship to race at high speed. Thus the solution is usually internal: find a way to shut off the engine / counter-act the cause.

 

[Wingsley]

If anyone can think of additional examples that I may have forgotten, by all means please add them.

 

[Lord Manitou]

Unlike Star Wars, warp is described as a bubble 3-dimensionally matrixed into sub-space that travels through an equally well-defined outer-space. The only way the occupants can change this is by dropping out of warp. Making close encounters with gravity wells would provide no reverse vector. Or none to speak of.

 

[Wingsley]

The only thing a gravity well has ever been shown to do was in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" and TMP4: a slingshot effect that results in time travel.

 

[Nebusj]

What do you think?

Well, at the risk of pretending actual physics applies in Star Trek … the greatest change in velocity you can produce with a gravitational slingshot is approximately twice the orbital speed of the planet around its star (or moon around its planet, or whatnot). That's meaningful to us here in 2014 because it's so very hard to get 26 kilometers per second of speed, but, for starships? That isn't even enough speed to be a trivial discrepancy.

You might in theory shed a little more by the resistance atmosphere offers to travel, but, a starship traveling at merely (!) the speed of light and diving as deep as it can through an Earth-type atmosphere without hitting the ground is going to spend approximately seven-thousandths of a second in atmosphere. It's not going to be slowed down appreciably.

 

[varek]

What do you think?

Well, at the risk of pretending actual physics applies in Star Trek … the greatest change in velocity you can produce with a gravitational slingshot is approximately twice the orbital speed of the planet around its star (or moon around its planet, or whatnot). That's meaningful to us here in 2014 because it's so very hard to get 26 kilometers per second of speed, but, for starships? That isn't even enough speed to be a trivial discrepancy.

You might in theory shed a little more by the resistance atmosphere offers to travel, but, a starship traveling at merely (!) the speed of light and diving as deep as it can through an Earth-type atmosphere without hitting the ground is going to spend approximately seven-thousandths of a second in atmosphere. It's not going to be slowed down appreciably.

Rather than diving deeply into a gravity well or a planet's atmosphere, the idea would be to only dip into it enough to slow down your ship slightly.
I thought some tangential equations might be conducive to such a maneuver.
If so, these could be programmed into your ship's computer, so they would be available, if ever needed.