10 Crazy Star Trek Fan Theories
3. The Excelsior's "Transwarp" Tests Actually Worked
A throwaway plot device it may be, but the USS Excelsior's much-hyped Transwarp Drive felt like a pretty big deal in The Search For Spock. After depending entirely on Warp Drive for the original series and the opening movies, here was a brand new form of propulsion that promised to make the old one obsolete... somehow. They were pretty sketchy on the details, and it was never mentioned again.
The term didn't crop up again in any meaningful way until the Borg were using it to traverse the galaxy in the blink of an eye in Star Trek: Voyager. Ultimately, Captain Janeway used one of their Transwarp Hubs to get her ship home 50 years ahead of schedule so, you'd think, if Starfleet had cracked this tech a good few decades prior, someone might have mentioned it.
Fans have concluded though that, in fact, they did, it's just not the same thing. Transwarp in Starfleet terms refers to the ability to immediately hit any warp factor the ship requires, rather than having to speed up through them as was previously seen in the original series. This explains why, in The Next Generation, Picard orders higher velocities considerably more freely than we'd seen previously. The term "transwarp" just got dropped because it was now the norm.