How maintaining an invented world can go wrong

Because the show has been around for such a long time, Star Trek terms have become part of the mythos. They've become nomenclature that everybody is familiar with. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know what 'Beam me up, Scotty,' means, or what flying at warp speed means, or what a Klingon is. Because there are so many extremely serious fans who will catch us, instantly, if we make a mistake, we've got to be very careful.

I remember when we were doing The Next Generation, one day, the visual effects guys had a phaser blast come out of a photon torpedo port. Well, this is completely unacceptable. I didn't have a clue of where photon torpedoes come out and where phasers come out, but we got three hundred letters, three days later, of people correcting us on that. So, they keep us on our toes.