It's hard to keep everything straight when you're writing a deep and complex fantasy world — it's even harder when you're stepping into that world for the first time. In order to keep all of Star Trek straight, Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, who co-wrote the upcoming Star Trek Beyond, made heavy use of the fan wiki Memory Alpha.

Pegg tells ComingSoon:

"We had the entirety of ‘Star Trek’ history at our disposal, and it’s always there online. There’s an amazing Wikipedia online called Memory Alpha. It became Doug [Jung] and my resource and the place that we’d turn to whenever we wanted to know, ‘What kind of weapons does an NX vessel carry?’ Memory Alpha has it."

But the most interesting part is that Pegg and Jung didn't just refer to Memory Alpha when they needed some knowledge — they even asked its creators to help them come up with an appropriate name for something in the new movie.

"We actually wrote to the Memory Alpha guys and got them to name a certain device in the movie. I sent them a letter saying, ‘Can you come up with this for me?’ In two hours, they came back with an entire etymological history of what the thing was. It’s beautiful. It’s fantastic to have that support network."

It's a pretty great way for Star Trek Beyond to keep its history straight, and to make sure that the new story elements it introduces fit properly within Star Trek's well established world. Longtime Star Trek fans may continue to hate the rebooted series' tone, but theoretically they shouldn't have a problem with its new canon.