@OP
Stardates started in order to lend a futuristic feel to the calendar and to avoid making any concrete predictions about when the show was supposed to be happening. Writers mostly made them up during TOS with
some rules and regard to continuity. During the TNG era, the second digit of the stardate indicated the current season of the show, and the first digit was always a four. Other Trek series ran with this idea. Now, everything has been retconned and Trek fans argue about how to harmonize old episodes with new Trek with about as much fervor as Christian apologists fighting for their preferred interpretation of scripture. Anyway, pretty much anything you want to know about that is on
Memory Alpha. (or, failing that,
Memory Beta)
During TOS, the warp drive was just another FTL drive to get them from point A to point B and advance the plot. Not much thought was given to the science behind it until Trek fans started getting jobs as physicists. By the time TNG rolled around, the warp drive created a "warp bubble" of bent spacetime around the ship. Within this bubble, the ship did not travel at relativistic speeds and could avoid things like time dilation because *hand wavy treknobabble* meant the bubble was warping spacetime but the ship wasn't actually moving fast enough to see relativistic effects.
From the
TNG Technical Manual:
The key to the creation of subsequent non-Newtonian methods, i.e., propulsion not dependent upon exhausting reaction products, lay in the concept of nesting many layers of warp field energy, each layer exerting a controlled amount of force against its next-outermost neighbor. The cumulative effect of the force applied drives the vehicle forward and is known as asymmetrical peristaltic field manipulation (APFM). Warp field coils in the engine nacelles are energized in sequential order, fore to aft. The firing frequency determines the number of field layers, a greater number of layers per unit time being required at higher warp factors. Each new field layer expands outward from the nacelles, experiences a rapid force coupling and decoupling at variable distances from the nacelles, simultaneously transferring energy and separating from the previous layer at velocities between 0.5c and 0.9c. This is well within the bounds of traditional physics, effectively circumventing the limits of General, Special, and Transformational Relativity. During force coupling the radiated energy makes the necessary transition into subspace, applying an apparent mass reduction effect to the spacecraft. This facilitates the slippage of the spacecraft through the sequencing layers of warp field energy.
So, to answer the question: They escape relativity by *hand wavy treknobabble*. Some mention is made in the technical manual that excessive use of the impulse engines, which are engines that manuever the ship at speeds up to very near the speed of light but do
not use warp technology ("impulse speed" = light speed) will cause ships to have to readjust their chronometers. Excessive use of half or three-quarters impulse during maneuvering around a solar system or during combat is supposed to be used only in emergencies because the relativistic effects cause problems, but -as far as I know- this has never actually been addressed in a script.
Oh, and the cool part:
It might work. Not work as envisioned by
Star Trek, but the concept might not be as weird or implausible as a lot of other Trek concepts. Although... exotic matter. Soooo... yeah.
@OP
I read your headline as "how do stargates work". Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed.
@previous (C)
TL;DR