Star Trek: 12 Biggest Ever Retcons

12. Shuttlecrafts

Shuttlecrafts are often used as an alternative means of transportation. They are especially useful for survey missions to newly-discovered planets. But in some of the early episodes, they are conspicuously absent.

The best example of this appears in The Enemy Within. A landing party is trapped on a planet where the temperature is plummeting dangerously low, but they can't be transported up because of a malfunction that split Kirk into his good and evil halves. In spite of the life-threatening temperatures, though, nobody suggests sending a shuttlecraft down to get the landing party. In fact, there's nothing to suggest that shuttlecrafts even exist. Only in subsequent episodes do they begin to appear, and everyone acts as if they've always been around. But if the shuttlecrafts were always around, why didn't they use them earlier?