What if Voyager didn't have its aeroshuttle?

An excellent reason to leave unnecessary dead weight behind...

Well, there sort of was. Several times, Picard was going places to represent the Federation or to enjoy himself - both potential uses for a craft called "captain's yacht". Yet Picard chose to use a standard shuttle, which is not particularly luxurious and thus would ill serve a diplomatic mission or a holiday cruise.

We might always say there was a detachable craft there at the bottom of the saucer, but it wasn't Captain's Yacht. Rather, it was a craft dedicated to some completely different mission which our heroes never had to perform. Say, a laboratory to be left behind on a planet, or an assault barge for delivering hundreds of troops at a time. Or even a diplomatic representation facility - but not a "yacht" capable of flying around, but merely a deployable embassy that could be lowered to the surface of a planet.

Not unless we have some reason to think that this aeroshuttle would have been a "scout ship" comparable to the eventual Delta Flyer. Since we canonically know nothing of the craft, we can't tell if it would have been slower or faster than a shuttle; more or less heavily armed; more or less capable of carrying cargo or personnel...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Good point. Really, the aeroshuttle is one of Voyager's missed opportunities.

The aeroshuttle's design is basically a modified runabout. It presumably has all the capabilities of a runabout, which were comparable to the Delta Flyer's.

 

Well, the interior design of the E-D Captain's Yacht appears to have been intended to be that of an E-D standard cabin set... Now that doesn't tell us anything about the capabilities of the Yacht!

Also, the aeroshuttle design is purely conjectural; the outline we see resembles Starfleet's fightercraft more than its runabout. We never get a glimpse that would allow us to associate the shape with the runabout set.

In any case, the only relevant design criterion of the Delta Flyer at the time of its construction was the ability to survive great external fluid pressure. Standard shuttles apparently couldn't do it, nor could the Voyager herself, so there's no real reason to think that a random craft sized between those two would be a suitable substitute for the building of the Delta Flyer.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In the early days of TNG, that ship had torpedoes and phasers and random "beams" coming out of all sorts of wrong places.

 

I suppose you could imagine it had systems that being cut off from home they couldn't afford to risk loosing sending out on away missions (especially the frequency they lost shuttles!)

Perhaps an ancillary computer core, independent life-support systems or a secondary warp core, that could all be used as backups, if they had problems with the primary systems. So a should be disposable system that took on a more important role in the Delta Quadrant.