I’d argue that it’s clear to this day that viewers have no idea how 1960s TV worked.
While Star Trek took a lot of time to get things right and with some level of continuity, the “long pole in the tent” as we say today was screenwriting. There just weren’t enough quality scrips, written on time to allow for great TV and for continuity errors to be corrected.
I remember hearing Robert Conrad talk years ago as some type of “Wild Wild West convention.” After about the third nitnoid question about some issue in one episode he went nuts. He correctly pointed out that these shows would mostly be shown twice. Once in the first run, and once in re-runs. You might get lucky and catch syndication, but that wasn’t a guarantee and there wasn’t a lot of money in it. They just didn’t worry about all of these to them minor issues.
In short the producers of had no way to know that we’d be picking the show apart 50 plus years later.
But unlike WWW, there was a writer’s guide that was there to teach writers how things worked in the show. Plus Roddenberry and Justman were there every day, and they tried at least to keep it “real”, or at least, consistent. They asked scientists to review scripts. They actually listened to advice.
And not knowing how big space is, or the uses and limitations of a shuttlecraft, are basic questions. We’re not talking how how biodiversity is achieved in a species that is born pregnant, or whether or not a silicon-based lifeform would burst into flame in an oxygen atmosphere.
And the shuttle questions were obvious to me the very first time I watched it. And I was 8.
But it’s not about knowing or not knowing, it’s about writing a story. If space was too big for the story they wanted to tell, then they made space smaller.
I’m not trying to pick a fight on this issue at all, but I’ll say this. Most TV shows have a writer’s guide, more commonly refereed to as the bible. But from my fairly extensive reading about TOS (I’m not an expert and don’t purport to be one) Roddenberry knew that the last season was it and he had largely checked out. And the rest of the writers and producers were just trying to get a script that would work to the actors in time to film. It wasn’t this well oiled machine that we have been led to believe. The same script writing issues occurred on TNG as well, to a lesser extent.
I just think that these series are less “tight” for lack of a better word than we (or at least I) generally thought they were. As I noted up thread, no one at the time believed that the episodes would be dissected line by line, shot by shot by millions for half a century and counting.
The show(s) have given me untold hours of pleasure and for that I give them my eternal gratitude.
Roddenberry was definitely out for the last season (Fred Freiberger was in charge that season). I think there was a “Show bible” but it probably had much less detail than we would consider sufficient these days.