I've been thinking about this concept a lot, during the long draggy hours at work, another far out sci fi idea to throw into the maw of my imagination, to be be chewed up and spat out.
It's not the normal view of black hole space travel, which posits them as a sot of wormhole short cut from one place in space time to another. My admittedly very limited research into black holes doesn't lead me to think this is a likely conclusion. But I was wondering if they could be used as a potential gravitational slingshot mechanism, like Voyager 2 and the major planets.
You would have to get in close, because as far as I can make out the sphere of influence of a normal black hole's gravity is not as wide as you might think. But as you get in close, you have to maintain practically the speed of light to maintain a stable orbit around the event horizon. So it makes me wonder if you could use ordinary black holes to accelarate interstellar travel up to near close to light speed, and whether there are enough black holes around to make this practical.
Just throwing something out there...
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