The Inertial Dampening Mechanism.
Another problem crops up because of the way we�ve represented space travel on Star Trek. Warp drive allows you to travel many times faster than the speed of light which, in and of itself, is something that seems to violate a basic tenet of relativity. But there might be some clever ways around that. A lot of physicists would agree that there might be a way to get around some of those problems.
When we show, for example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise jumping to warp, that ship is clearly accelerating at extraordinary rates. Probably hundreds or thousands of G forces would be involved in that kind of acceleration. By comparison an astronaut on the space shuttle maybe experiences 3Gs, three times the force of gravity. If you were to just be accelerated at a hundred or a thousand Gs, you�d be crushed like a bug. so how does our crew survive the jump to warp? Well, we coined the term inertial damper.
The inertial dampers basically allow us to nullify the effects of acceleration. Whether it�s when we�re jumping to warp or if the ship is being rattled by an ion storm or rattled by some sort of an explosion from an alien weapon. the inertial dampers basically take the edge off of those kinds of accelerations. How do they work? Well, we have no idea. That's not a technology that is presently possible. But one would imagine that if you can manipulate gravity � and of course on Star Trek we have artificial gravity plates, we have some way of controlling the force of gravity � if you can control the force of gravity and create an artificial gravity environment on your ship, one would imagine that you could also control inertia because they�re, in effect, the same thing.
Acceleration and deceleration are basically the same thing, so the inertial dampers are not only protecting our crew when it jumps to warp and accelerates to this extraordinary velocity, but they�re also protecting the crew when it slows down and stops. So deceleration is essentially the same thing as acceleration. It�s a change in velocity.
