What if — Star Trek without FTL

[Lilgreenman]

Look at how deeply warp travel is explained in TOS:

* Warp travel has existed for centuries, was invented by Zefram Cochran (original script spelling) and is many times faster than light
* Warp speeds are numbered, on some sort of exponential scale
* Most ships can go up to about Warp 10, after which it becomes unsafe
* Warp engines are powered by some combination of dilithium and matter-antimatter reactions, which occur in the nacelles of the ship

That's all there is - we didn't get quantum singularities, warp cores, plasma, Cochrane scales or anything until the movies and the TNG era.

My point is that the least plausible part of your pitch is not the "STL Enterprise" but the "Gene would stay in line with modern science, and explain this onscreen." In TOS drama was more important than scientific accuracy (every single one of my points up there was made so there could be more drama in some episode or other), and so we wouldn't have gotten Only A Few Stars Trek unless stories could have been based around it.