Not sure what I plan to do with this page yet!
I started a (hobby) comic that was going to be about a bunch of friends getting tangled up in a pansexual polyamorous soap opera and I wanted them to have something to be doing apart from that, so I had them starting on a Star Trek fan film and that got me interested in Trek fandom artefacts like the Memory Alpha wiki.
Memory alpha makes heroic efforts to present a Trek continuity where all facts revealed from all episodes of the canonical series are all true. Given that Trek is not even consistent within one series, this sometimes takes a lot of creative interpolation. The movies are especially prone to redesigning star ships and uniforms at whim and making odd changes to justify an amusing vinette. Obviosly truing to make sense of the resulting continuity errors is pointless and it is easier to think of the different series as being separate but related. On the other hand working out explanations for this nonsense can be fun.
Considering the original series (concentionally abbreviated TOS). What is the state of starship technology?
The original pilot
(retconned as taking place 10 years before TOS)
has a line to the effect that they are starting a new era of exploration now that the time barrier has been broken.
Several episodes feature human-looking people with degenerate or exaggerated versions of
human societies (Ancient Rome with televisions, Chigago Gangsters of the 1920s,
the Yang and Kohns in The Omega Glory
), and ‘Space Seed’ has a sublight sleeper ship.
It looks very like Earthlings originally dispersed to colonies in sleeper ships,
and now they have devised faster-than-light travel they can re-establish contact with these old colonies
and see how they have all gone quietly mad in their isolation.
Against this is the revelation that Zephram Cochraine of Alpha Centuri, inventor of warp drive, was thought to have died 150 years ago. This would make starships a commonplace and the Enterprise much less excepptional.