Any fairly trivial breaks from canon that make big differences to you?

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This might not be your personal reason for your dislike of the VOY but there are many others who cannot accept that any Star Trek series has a female lead. It seems that for some there shouldn’t be any female captains in Star Trek.

Sorry, but you are wrong! They have much more interest in ‘internal consistency’ because they know how toxic fans can be!
They had to change the visuals because the visuals of TOS are completely out of date. That’s the reason Roddenberry himself changed the visuals for TMP. (the the failure of TMP was the reason they changed the visuals again for the later movies.) So they tried their best to change the visuals in a way that they fit between ENT and TWOK.

By making such assumptions as the one above you fuel these fracturing debates. BTW we should not forget that all Star trek series after TOS had to deal with the fact that fans did not like them. These ‘fracturing debates’ are part of the Star Trek franchise since the anouncement of TNG!

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Because the evidence against your staement is also on the screen.

The same can be said about the TOS, the TMP and the movie Klingons in general. They all look different. They even behave differently than the Klingons we know from TNG.

But that does not explain the radical different uniform and ship design in TMP, a movie which takes place just a couple of years after the last episode and not a decade later.

Because it was cheaper just to recreate the old costumes than to design something completely new. And BTW the sets they used were originally build by some fans for their own fan series.
And Trials and Tribble-lations was an hommage to TOS in which they used many scene from the original episode Trouble with Tribbles so they had to use the original visuals.

A TV show which at that time had spawned four very successfull movies. But the fans hated TNG. The fans always hated the latest spin-off.

There is a very, very good reason to update the visuals. No one ecxept some ultra-hard_core fans would watch a SciFi-TV show with visuals from the 1960s! Visuals which BTW are completely different from the visuals seen in all other Star Trek shows and which seem to be primitive compared to the visuals of ENT. So they tried their best to update the dated visuals. Okay, some decisions were questionable, like the bald Klingons in the first season of DIS.
Sadly there are some fans who are so inflexible and conservative that they really hate everything which does not fit into their notion of how Star Trek should be or look. Do not forget that in 1987 fans really hated TNG, because Kirk, Spock etc. were not in it. In 1993 they hated DS9 because it was gritty and takes place on a space station and not on a starship exploring the unkown. In 1995 they hated VOY because it is about a starship crew trying to find a way home (instead of exploring the unkown). In 2001 they hated ENT because it is a prequel which look much more modern than TOS and because of the whole temporal cold war plot. You see Star Trek fans always find a reason to hate a new Star Trek series. And that’s dumb!

So can we please return to the topic!!!

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I mean… I started rewatching enterprise, and it seems like it’s “wagon trail through the stars” to me.

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I admit, I much prefer the “wagon train to the stars” aspect of Star Trek - TOS, most aspects of TNG, Voyager, Enterprise all had that. That said, my home STA campaign is a more conflict/military style game based during the Dominion War. Along the way I’ve adapted several old FASA modules, Living Campaign Missions, These are The Voyages missions, Strange New Worlds, several STA standalone missions, and story elements from several novels as part of it. Hell, I’ve even allowed my players to pull from their own personal trove of Star Trek knowledge. All in all, as to answer the OP question "Any fairly trivial breaks from canon that make big differences to you? Honestly, no, nothing at all.

Who am I to judge? After all, I just ran a holodeck adventure under the guise of a psychological evaluation. The enter into Sesame Street right about the time they see several Jem’hadar warriors leap into Oscar the Grouches trash can. Turns out they waylaid Burt and fled with Rubby Ducky. Convinced to pursue the Jem’Hadar they leapt into Oscar’s Trash Can only to find themselves at the start of a “Ninja Warrior” obstacle through which they had to navigate to pursue the Jem’hadar. As they reached the top of Mount Dilithium, they finally found themselves standing before the Grand Nagus with the Jem’hadar behind him holding the Rubby Ducky…think of the scene in the Princess Bride where Wesley and Fezzini have their battle wits. So, I say again, who I am to judge? I just added Sesame Street, Ninja Warrior, and the Princess Bride!

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Except when they’re in direct conflict. “Turnabout Intruder” in TOS tells us that women could not be starship captains. Both ENT and DIS prominently feature women as highly-decorated and respected starship captains far before the events of TOS.

Obviously you can explain away what’s said in “Turnabout Intruder” - Janice Lester was simply wrong, she was making excuses for why she never rose to command, she was insane and nothing she said can be relied on, etc. But you have to come up with something to reconcile it, or else you have to throw out either “Turnabout Intruder” from canon, or throw out Captain Georgieu from DIS and Captain Hernandez from ENT.

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And that’s the only sensible explanation, because she is the only person who said that and no one else. This is one of the cases where we do not have all the facts. And this explanation does neither contradict canon nor does it create continuity problems.

The problem is that there are many fan who really believe that they have all the facts and can decide something is canon or not or creates continuity problems or not. None of us has all the facts. I think the best analogy would be archeology. Every new episode (or movie) is excavations which gives us new knowledge about Star Trek. This knowledge allows us to speculate about Star Trek and to create new theories, the fanon. But in every excavation things could be discovered which seemingly contradicts our knowledge, but only contradicts our theories. So we have to create new theories. But this is the problem. Here fans act unreasonable, similiar to some archaelogists in the past, who ignored facts because they contradicted their precious theories (or the Bible).

With that in mind it should be clear why Janice Lester’s statement doe not create a continuity problem. Because at that time we had only very limited knowledge about Star Trek and a lot of people really believed that women have no place in any military. But with new episodes and movies and the social changes which began in the 1970s it became clear that the old theory cannot be correct, because the old theory (and not the episode) created a continuity problem. So a new theory was needed. And this is only one example.

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Other continuity problems are the Klingons still. Sure they have been changed over time, but every series up to and including ENT considered the TOS Klingons as real, with ENT providing a justification. Yet, DIS had to (fundamentally) redesign them to a point it’s hard to reconcile it. Then there’s the Warhammer-like ships, contradicting Klingon designs from both the past and the very near future. Then there’s the Federation ships as well, with their more geometric, angled, sharp looks. Both DS9 and ENT portrayed the ships from this era as TOS did, with minimal changes, but now all of a sudden they have to be revamped completely. Moreover, while I personally like much of the Enterprise, no ships throughout the entire existence of Star Trek, from the 22nd to 24th centuries, had windows in place of the viewscreen, yet since the reboots, now every ship has giant windows on their bridges, including the Enterpise. And finally some technology seemed way more advanced than should be available in the 23rd century. The explanation for something like the spore drive was a massive coverup, which while not entirely out-of-character for Starfleet, seemed at that scale to be very counter to their general MO.

To various degrees, these are all continuity errors. Some errors always slip through, like visuals and sound FX for phasers and torpedoes for example, a couple small ones are deliberate, such as the subtle changes of makeup over the years. But DIS as a whole deliberately introduced so many new concepts that contradicted elements from notably TOS and ENT. And AFAIK, this seems like a reasonably objective view. That I don’t like DIS and that I think it’s ‘bad’ is my opinion, yes, but saying that there are continuity errors is fairly objective.

In any case, no-one’s opinion really matters. These folk are making the shows in whatever way they want. It’s fine. But that is simply also why I don’t feel like I want to be part of a fandom anymore, since it doesn’t matter what I, and others, say. Canon is canon, that’s true. I’ll just have to live in my own “little world” to enjoy these things the way I always enjoyed them in the past.

And to close this tl;dr, I just want to apologize for my own contribution to this debate. Like many, I’m very passionate about the things that I love, and I have a certain perspective on these things that, if something contradicts that, it kind of hits a nerve. I meant no offense.

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Fleet captains are senior captains with a different set of responsibilities. Kirk referring to Pike being “promoted” to Fleet Captain doesn’t make it a rank. It’s a position or honorific, nothing more. Since no costuming notes for Fleet Captain exist anywhere, the badge on Pike’s room at Starbase 11 only gives his rank as “Capt.”, he is never referred to as Fleet Captain anywhere except the teaser of “The Menagerie, Part 1”, and since the rank does not exist in any real-world navy Starfleet was based on, it cannot be a rank but must be a position / honorific.

You can of course have it your way, since there’s not enough evidence on screen to come to a definitive conclusion. But at least the book isn’t wrong in not having a Fleet Captain rank, as the 24th Century doesn’t have them - Deputy Directors don’t count.

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I’d agree with this. Updating the look of the bridge to reflect 21st century developments is fine; I didn’t expect them to keep the designs from TOS. But things like the holographic communications system were unnecessary, let alone the magic teleportation drive that was never heard about again in any future incarnation of Trek.

Or a Klingon war 10 years before TOS that had the Klingons winning so handily that they were able to conquer a starbase in Earth’s solar system - that’s just absurd.

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So much for people acting like grownups…

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We should really stop a discussion which sooner or later will really turn toxic.

But first this:
Why does every one thinks that they know everything about Star Trek? We simply cannot. Everything that has been shown in any of the 778 episodes and movies is just a small, a very small part of a much larger universe. Compare watching Star Trek which researching an ancient culture. Sometimes you will find something that does not seem to make sense, but it suddenly makes sense if you discover new information, even if it is just something you had smply overlooked or ignored. But one thing you should never do, dismissing new information because it seems to contradict older information. (This was a problem scientist had way into the 20th century. And even today researchers fall into this trap.)
I hope this is a good advice…

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Agreed with all of that. But what I’d say is it’s not just specific data points but pretty large events and the general tone of the world.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the direction they took with Picard, and the tone, and what they say about the Federation in 2399, and if I ran a game set then, I might well ignore what’s there or change it pretty dramatically. But that’s just me; other people will feel very differently, and that’s cool. And as far as canon, there’s certainly nothing in Picard that isn’t believable based on what came before.

But with the prequel series, I think it’s a little different question. When I look at Discovery, I honestly don’t see how you go from the world and the Federation we see there, and the tone of the whole thing, to what we see in TOS. Again, we can all disagree, but I think that when you go prequel, you make your job a heck of a lot harder, because it’s not just a question of individual facts, but of building a world that the past (but taking place in the future) shows could believably emerge from. ENT has the advantage of taking place almost a century before TOS, so there’s a lot of room for change, but setting DIS just a decade before Kirk’s Enterprise really (to me, anyway) set up a lot of canon problems that i don’t think they really handled well. At least from where I sit, anyway.

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That’s all the same.
The war with the Klingons is a good example. All we know from TOS was that there was a war between Federation and Klingon Empire but we never learned when and how big this war was. We also did not learn when the first contact with the Klingons happened, only that it was not a good one. ENT and DIS gave us this information, but both times it contradicted the theory fans made about these events.

You fell in the trap I’ve mentioned.
Ten years can be a very long time and a lot of things can happen in ten years. And a lot of things can change in ten years. Who had thought in 1980 that the Berlin Wall will fall and Germany will be reunificated by 1990? No one. Even in 1988 it was an impossible dream.
And BTW Earth was never shown in TOS and we rarely saw other Starfleet installations or vessels. So did not learn much abou the Federation from TOS.
You’ve mention canon problem generated by TOS. What are they? Are you really sure that these are canon problems? Are you sure that you did not overlook some information from a TOS or TAS episode? Maybe the information that would erase those ‘canon problems’ is still missing.

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I am intimately familiar with Star Trek’s canon, including the JJVerse - though I reject the JJVerse in its entirety. So much so that I know that what @starkllr says about Discovery rings true. Discovery is too advanced compared to TOS and the advanced look wreaks havoc with canon, so how do we reconcile the facts on screen so it makes sense to us, with minimal disruption to canon?

Sure, we can fall on the easy explanation: that technology of today is more advanced than it was in the past and the Enterprise has always appeared like it did in Discovery. But that explanation ignores the existing canon. Since canon is whatever appeared on screen, we either need to accept that the Enterprise appeared in its original configuration, was refit to the Discovery version, and refit back to the original configuration, or we need to fill in the blanks here and come up with an explanation to reconcile everything.

Fortunately, I’ve got one. It all starts with Star Trek First Contact.

The Enterprise-E travels back in time to 2063 via the Borg sphere’s temporal wake. Picard and company destroy the sphere, whose remains crash into the arctic. Meanwhile, Picard and crew fix up the Phoenix and its launch center, successfully send Phoenix on its way, and disappear back to the 24th Century.

So while the Enterprise-E crew minimally disrupted the timeline, the remains of the Borg sphere lay in the arctic for nearly a century, until their discovery in 2153. Now, it stands to reason that even though Enterprise NX-01 prevented the Borg from contacting the collective, the wreckage of the Borg sphere remained. There would have to be advanced components remaining undamaged on that ship, components that Earth could study and reverse engineer. The reverse-engineered components, being based off technology some 200 years more advanced, would be fitted into Starfleet vessels. The end result would be what we see on Star Trek Discovery.

So now that we have established how Discovery could appear more advanced than TOS, how do we explain the appearance of TOS and TAS? The answer is that what we see on screen is the state of the galaxy prior to Picard and the Enterprise-E traveling back in time. In fact, every TOS and TAS episode along with all TOS films were affected. However, the law of diminishing returns would also kick in, and the timeline would correct itself by the time the Enterprise-C was launched.

Now, this is all a pretty neat package to explain Discovery’s advanced tech, but there is one fly in the ointment: Trials and Tribble-ations. Fortunately, there is a really easy solution to that one, and that is the Orb of Time. When the Orb of Time sent the Defiant backwards in time it also sent them to the original untouched 23rd Century. The Orb would have also “corrected” their memories of the time period, thus no comments about how the ship and equipment looks different. Upon returning to the 24th Century the Orb would have “restored” the crew’s memories to the new normal, and at the same time bring tribbles back from extinction.

As you can see, I don’t like the easy explanation. It’s more fun to do it this way.

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