10 Changes Star Trek Hoped You Wouldn't Notice
8. The Warp Scale
One of Star Trek's most famous episodes is Threshold, the second season entry from Voyager. In it, Tom Paris breaks the fabled Warp 10 barrier, allowing him to enter transwarp. Back in the late eighties, Gene Roddenberry himself suggested that Warp 10 would allow the traveller to exist in every part of the universe simultaneously, rendering all forms of space flight obsolete.
The Original Series used a different scale when it came to measuring Warp speed, with the Enterprise travelling well above Warp 10 from time to time. Further to this, in the Next Generation, the Enterprise-D is able to travel at Warp 13 in Q's version of the future. Far from existing in all corners of the universe at this point, it still takes the ship plenty of time to get from place to place.
The trials on the USS Excelsior were aimed at hitting transwarp, though they were deemed a failure and the ship was fitted with a conventional warp engine, shown in Star Trek VI. While a theory exists that they did, in fact, succeed, with all Warp speeds adjusting to accommodate the new capabilities, the truth is that for a long time in Star Trek, ships simply travelled at whatever speed the current writer imagined, failing to account for any limits imposed as time went on.