Star Trek TNG: Firstborn

[Madner Kami]

Didn't the Klingons have a working time machine by that point? According to Voyager.

You'd assume that anyone does by that point. Slingshotting around a gravity well isn't exactly something you should never ever ever ever do, not, it's standard practise to get high speeds.

[CrypticMirror]

Didn't the Klingons have a working time machine by that point? According to Voyager.

You'd assume that anyone does by that point. Slingshotting around a gravity well isn't exactly something you should never ever ever ever do, not, it's standard practise to get high speeds.

I believe you also have to do it with your warp field carefully (or luckily: Disclaimer: "Luckily" only applies to ships called "Enterprise") calibrated or you end up as spaghetti spread across five hundred different spatial dimensions.

[Darth Wedgius]

Didn't the Klingons have a working time machine by that point? According to Voyager.

You'd assume that anyone does by that point. Slingshotting around a gravity well isn't exactly something you should never ever ever ever do, not, it's standard practise to get high speeds.

This is a common maneuver for our space probes, but we're trying to take advantage of whatever free lunch we can because our rockets are pretty pitiful compared to Federation or Klingon sublight drives. They don't take years just go get between planets within the same system. Also, remarkably few of our space probes go back in time. Unless that's the real reason for the Pioneer anomaly, which would be kind of cool.

[Madner Kami]

Didn't the Klingons have a working time machine by that point? According to Voyager.

You'd assume that anyone does by that point. Slingshotting around a gravity well isn't exactly something you should never ever ever ever do, not, it's standard practise to get high speeds.

This is a common maneuver for our space probes, but we're trying to take advantage of whatever free lunch we can because our rockets are pretty pitiful compared to Federation or Klingon sublight drives. They don't take years just go get between planets within the same system. Also, remarkably few of our space probes go back in time. Unless that's the real reason for the Pioneer anomaly, which would be kind of cool.

Depending on your point of view, all of our probes are actually travelling to the future, but that is besides the point. Warp Travel doesn't free you from gravitational influences (this is actually in cannon) and especially during the general time-frame of TOS to late TOS-movie era, gaining that little bit more speed is ever so valueable, so you can bet your arse that people would use slingshot maneuvers whenever possible, as it makes you go faster and helps you conserve fuel. Someone, somewhere, somewhen, is bound to run into the time-travel effect. If Starfleet did it by accident, then so can others.

[Darth Wedgius]

Didn't the Klingons have a working time machine by that point? According to Voyager.

You'd assume that anyone does by that point. Slingshotting around a gravity well isn't exactly something you should never ever ever ever do, not, it's standard practise to get high speeds.

This is a common maneuver for our space probes, but we're trying to take advantage of whatever free lunch we can because our rockets are pretty pitiful compared to Federation or Klingon sublight drives. They don't take years just go get between planets within the same system. Also, remarkably few of our space probes go back in time. Unless that's the real reason for the Pioneer anomaly, which would be kind of cool.

Depending on your point of view, all of our probes are actually travelling to the future, but that is besides the point. Warp Travel doesn't free you from gravitational influences (this is actually in cannon) and especially during the general time-frame of TOS to late TOS-movie era, gaining that little bit more speed is ever so valueable, so you can bet your arse that people would use slingshot maneuvers whenever possible, as it makes you go faster and helps you conserve fuel. Someone, somewhere, somewhen, is bound to run into the time-travel effect. If Starfleet did it by accident, then so can others.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The slingshot maneuver used by our space probes effectively captures some of a planet's orbital energy for use by the space probe. It'll gain you around a dozen km/sec per encounter, from what I've been able to tell. Warp 1 is about 300,000 km/sec. The Enterprise would have to go far out of it's way to get the right planetary encounters in order to gain around 0.00004 of that Warp 1 speed.

I will save my arse for surer bets.