Roddenberry's late 1960s universe contains all sorts of wacky and fantastical things, from fantastical alien races to futuristic technology.

Star Trek would not be the same without one such incredible piece of technology, and those like Kirk and Picard would have little opportunity to explore the miraculously empty Milky Way. 

Among the many technologies used on Star Trek is undoubtedly the Warp Drive, an important element of the vast history of the Star Trek franchise. Two reasons make the Warp Drive fundamental. One is that it is fundamental to First Contact between the Federation and the Vulcans.

The reason behind this is rather simple: when a species knows how to traverse the universe more easily, it is more likely to run into alien species, which is why they should introduce themselves.

The federation also functions as a significant indicator of when a culture has advanced enough to handle the wealth of technological innovations and information available throughout the federation, but it does not distort the culture's natural progression.

A second reason for the importance of the warp drive is that space is a vast expanse. It can take weeks to months to travel between two relatively close star systems even with warp drive technology. The USS Voyager crew knows this all too well.

The journey of Captain Kathryn Janeway to bring her crew home from the Delta Quadrant took her an estimated 70 years - without factoring in any pit stops or detours en route.

To close the vast distances between star systems between episodes, the writers of Star Trek needed to find a solution to the slow-moving jaunt through space while twiddling their thumbs in the holodeck. The term is often used, but what does it mean?

Despite warp drive being purely fictional, a lot of thought had been put into explaining and exploring how it might work. By blending various types of science fiction, Star Trek created an intergalactic space travel fusion that has only grown over time.

The first example of such travel using such speeds was mentioned in the 1915 - 1921 novel Skylark of Space, so the concept had been around for a while. If an object wanted to travel such distances, it would have to go faster than light, which is the biggest problem with this type of space traversal.

Despite Einstein's theory of relativity, warp travel works by warping space-time like the folds in cloth, bending reality slightly so it can travel at such high speeds.

As a futuristic civilization, it would make sense that they would have a futuristic power source as well. Star Trek's main fuel is produced by burning both matter and antimatter in a fusion reactor, with dilithium crystals acting as the mediators.

Warp bubbles are created when the vessel is accelerated, which distorts the local space-time continuum and allows travel that is not permitted by the laws of physics.

In Voyager, renegade pilot Tom Paris discovered that it was possible to go faster, but speeds this great started bending reality too much, resulting in being everywhere at once at the same time. 

The Original Series defined the warp factor as the cube of the number multiplied by the speed of light; for example, Warp 4 is defined as 64 times the speed of light. 

During The Next Generation, however, the specifics behind warp got more relaxed, and the writers were able to make these distances work for whatever the story called for. Star Trek's warp drive technology is arguably the most important element of its storytelling.

As their crew's primary means of transportation, it's fundamental to almost every episode, but Discovery explores several whole episodes of what happens when it's severely limited, as well as the possibilities and problems surrounding it. The series is integral to it, and it's likely to remain so.