10 Changes Star Trek Hoped You Wouldn't Notice
6. The Size Of The Galaxy
Star Trek The Original Series and the movies that followed operated fast and loose with their rules of space travel. In the second pilot episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before, the Enterprise comes face to face with the Great Barrier that encircles the Milky Way Galaxy. The ship would return to it in By Any Other Name, when the Kelvans attempted to use the vessel to get back to their own galaxy.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier sees the Enterprise-A travel in the opposite direction, heading directly to the centre of the galaxy this time. Here, they discover that a planet exists at the galactic core, whereupon a non-corporeal and malevolent entity dwells. Clearly, the greatest film of them all.
A much smaller example of the Original Series' ability to travel all over the galaxy comes in the following film, with the USS Excelsior warping from the Alpha Quadrant to the Beta Quadrant in mere minutes, though that's a bit more forgivable with Earth being located close enough to the border.
This all becomes much more of an issue when one thinks of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. The issues relating to the latter are obvious, while the former states that the station, located in the Denorious Belt, is on the outskirts of the Federation, far away from help in times of need. Added to this, the Bajoran Wormhole is the most fantastic discovery, linking the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants together.
However, back in Jim Kirk's day, none of these things were particularly far apart, making all of these discoveries far less impressive.