Answer (1 of 14): The term “continuity error” gets thrown around a lot in reference to Trek, oftentimes erroneously.
Some of the most famous “continuity errors” can be explained with a little imagination and common sense.
WHY DOES KHAN KNOW CHEKHOV IF CHEKHOV WASN’T INTRODUCED TO STAR TREK UNTI...
The warp scale changed. The Enterprise exceeded warp 10 several times in the Original Series. Then that infamous episode of Voyager claims that warp 10 is a theoretical limit which is difficult to reach and literally impossible to exceed.
The warp scale did indeed change. I Actually seem to remember that was adressed in TNG.
Also the stardate naming convention changed after TOS.
Scotty was simply that good at tweaking the engines. That, or the crew were just playing to Kirk’s ego, pretending to go super fast à la "this amp goes to 11” while they trundled along at warp 7.
Moving at 10+ in TOS was always due to some alien influence or something. The Enterprise engines were definitely not capable of those speeds under normal conditions.
With that said, in TOS, warp 10+ is just “you are moving really fast”. But in VOY, warp 10 is “you are literally occupying every point in space simultaneously” and there is nothing past warp 10. It is a complete reimagining of the ceiling to warp speed. In TOS, it seemed there was no theoretical maximum warp speed. But by VOY, warp was capped at 10, and once you reached that speed, you became a salamander because reasons.
Frankly, I never saw the salamander thing as a real downside to transwarp 🦎
Its a logarithmic scale, it makes sense that 10 is the maximum. The difference between warp 9.1 and 9.2 is the same as the difference between warp 1 and 6, for example.
It’s like decibels, there is a theoretical maximum. It just doesn’t make much sense to TV audiences since bigger number = more fast, in a linear way.
This my head canon… In the movies they were working on transwarp drive on the Excelsior. The warp factor on transwarp drives is different from a regular TOS warp drive.
When Sulu put the hammer down on the Excelsior in ST VI, it proved that transwarp was just way better than regular warp drive. For whatever reason they couldn’t make transwarp work on the Constitution class so most of them were decommissioned.
By the time of TNG, pretty much everything is transwarp, so no one bothers calling it that ,they just call it warp drive since it became the standard. The transwarp factor is used everywhere, but everyone just calls it warp factor.
So it’s kinda like a change from imperial to metric units.