Orius
Legend
But I do love how people complain about how they might screw with continuity. Might I suggest to those people that they go look at the old shows again? REAL hard. They screwed with their own continuity practically from day one.
Oh yeah, early first season TOS has tons of holes like this. Local reruns (with all the fancy new special effects) just had "Mudd's Women" on and there's lots of technical holes in how the ship's engines work. "Balance of Terror" as you mentioned is another glaring example, with Romulan ships not having warp drives, but some how being able to fight an interstellar war. Starfleet and the Federation were't there from the start, and there's some inconsistancies with mentions of things like a United Earth (though some of that was later worked back into pre-Federation Enterprise. And the approximate date of those early episodes fluctuate from the 22nd to the 28th century. Some of that background information on Star Trek sort of got put together piecemeal mostly during the first season. Heck, the whole 4-quadrant system didn't get established until season three of TNG!