Physicist Finds Picard Maneuver Creates 3 Ship Images, Not 2

3 articles · Updated · gadgetreview.com · Sep 11

Níckolas de Aguiar Alves calculated that the USS Stargazer’s warp feint would show an enemy three simultaneous images, making the Star Trek tactic more effective than the episode depicted.
Two acceleration phases drive the result: Alves modeled the ship accelerating to faster-than-light speed and then decelerating near its target, rather than cruising at a constant warp velocity.
That geometry mirrors real physics behind Cherenkov radiation, where particles outrun light in a medium and create overlapping signals from different points along their path.
Alves said the idea emerged from his wave-memory research at Brazil’s Federal University of ABC; his paper was posted to arXiv on Aug. 22 and accepted by the American Journal of Physics.
An extra warp burst would raise the apparent images to five, reinforcing his broader point that Star Trek got the underlying physics right even if it undercounted the effect.