Most of the planned season 5 wound up in season 4, but there was so much that some of it did wind up in the actual fifth season. Most of what made it wound up in the back half, which is significantly better than the final season’s front half.
Kind of too early to tell. Season one was heavy on setup. I personally enjoyed it. You really need to be familiar with The Clone Wars and Rebels, though.
They actually did. Remember the Relativity? They talk a big game but, like the regular Prime Directive, the Temporal Prime Directive is secondary to the continued existence of the Federation. That’s why there wasn’t a peep out of them when Kirk stole some whales from the past.
Transporters are way less useful on their own than you think. Take the following scenario…
Centuries ago, your people developed transporters. You improved the tech until you could beam to the next star system. Now you have a network of them spanning hundreds of light years. You can cross your entire interstellar civilization in minutes. Your people discovered warp a couple decades ago, but it’s merely a curiosity next to your transporters and wasn’t developed much.
One day, you encounter a new alien race called the Romulans. They use primitive warp drive ships rather than transporters, so you don’t think much of them. Things are a bit tense for a few years, and then they demand your unconditional submission to the Romulan Star Empire. This is absurd, so you obviously refuse.
Three days later, refugees start beaming in from one of the outer colonies. Reports indicate that none of your soldiers ever saw a Romulan. Rather than beaming down soldiers to fight, the Romulans levelled the colony with energy weapons from high orbit. Your forces tried to board the enemy ships, but they had some kind of energy field around them preventing transport. A lucky shot from a planet-side cannon firing beyond its rated range managed to find the mark, but was blocked by that same energy field just meters away from the hull.
It’s been three weeks and now the Romulan fleet is in orbit of the homeworld. Bolts of green light start falling from the sky, obliterating the capital city, but leaving the capital building intact. Your transporters are still unable to pierce their shields. Your scientists think they’ll crack it eventually, but they need weeks and you only have minutes.
With all the major population centers destroyed, the Romulan commander repeats their ultimatum: unconditional surrender or complete destruction. You accept their demands. Three Romulans beam into your office, the first time since the war began that your people have come face to face. Two are holding rifles. The other is holding a document and a pen.
Interestingly, this scene technically isn’t part of continuity because “The Cage” as a whole technically isn’t part of continuity, only the parts that made it into later episodes, like “The Menagerie,” are. Remember, “The Cage” was a rejected pilot that only got released later on as a bonus, like a collection of deleted scenes. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was the show’s accepted pilot.
Depends on the distance being traveled by both ships. The Milky Way is 1000 light years deep, so there’s a lot of vertical room to maneuver. Mentioned locations at real star systems, like Wolf 359, are definitely not all on the same plane in any way. Possibly more relevant, though, is that ‘up’ isn’t really much of a thing. Star systems can (and do) have their axis tilted significantly off of the galactic axis, so even if you define ‘up’ within a star system and orient your ship that way, you may wind up tilted weird when you arrive at the next system due to it having a different ‘up’. You could define ‘up’ by the galactic axis, but that would still only apply to the one organization; there’s no reason for the UFP, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, and Dominion to all agree that one side of the galaxy is the top and the other is the bottom, but they do anyway. Humans couldn’t even agree on which way to orient maps of our own planet for centuries.
Common misconception. There were several different emblems for different parts of the fleet, but each ship did not have a unique emblem. Someone from the costume department assumed that each ship had a unique emblem and one episode had it wrong, but we also have the memo telling them to not do that again.