Star Trek: 10 Biggest Differences Between Kirk's Enterprise And Picard's

Comparing the maximum speed of both ships isn't really fair because, although there was a writer's guide to calculate how long it should take the ship to travel anywhere, this guide was rarely consulted, and, by the time of The Next Generation, an entirely new system replaced it.

In Gene Roddenberry's initial draft proposal, Star Trek Is..., he stated that the maximum speed of the Original Series Enterprise was 0.73 lightyears per hour, which would mean it could travel Voyager's 70,000 lightyear journey home in about 11 years as opposed to 70, and Voyager was much faster than the Enterprise-D.

Part of this confusion comes because, in The Next Generation and beyond, new calculations were implemented and warp 10 was defined as infinite speed, an seemingly impossible velocity that would allow you to occupy every point in space simultaneously. The speed of warp factors increased exponentially from 1 to 9 to 9.1, 9.2 and beyond, never reaching 10, as this would be infinite speed. The Enterprise-D was established in the show as having a standard maximum warp factor of 9.5 and, given the speed of 0.73 lightyears per hour, Scotty could apparently get the ship beyond Voyager's max speed of warp 9.975. It is safe to assume that this was merely a mistake, but maybe Scotty really was just a miracle-worker.