Star Trek: 10 Terrible Ways To Time Travel

The sling-shot or 'lightspeed breakaway factor' effect for temporal displacement is almost frighteningly common in Star Trek. No doubt the best known example of the procedure was to get the Bounty back to the '80s (where the whales at) in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, but 'sling-shot' was, in fact, first used in The Original Series episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday to get the Enterprise home, and in Assignment Earth for 'historical research'! It has also featured quite copiously in beta canon.

It's not so much the technique itself that's bad, although accelerating a starship around the gravity well of a star at countless times the speed of light is certainly no warp in the park and seriously can't be good for your health! It's more the fact that if Spock isn't on hand to help with the calculations, the next best (and really only) option becomes a Borg Queen! Oh, go on then, let's chance it! You only live once, unless you're snapped back into existence by Q!

Surely there are more "intelligences" who can "isolate the divergence and microshift for any chronitonic radiation," as Dr Jurati put it in Penance. Seven of Nine was right there in the room, and she's pretty darn smart in any universe! Even if Jurati did eventually manage to change things, taking any version of the Borg Queen with you on a trip anywhere or when is just a truly terrible idea.