I'm a big fan of runabouts (though I think either Bajor or the station should have had larger combat ships much earlier) and the Delta Flyer because even if you accept 'speed of plot' that smaller vessels have the speed and range to take several day if not weeks long trips between bases/ships, the idea that something like a Type-6, much less a shuttlepod would be viable for that length of journey for the crew (something highlighted in several critiques of fighter-craft IIRC) beggars belief and runabouts and Delta Flyer at least leave open the possibility that such trips could be done - though perhaps not in the level of comfort that a senior officer is used to? Personally, during TNG and DS9 I would have much preferred that trips further than Bajor or Cardassia at a push (between one and two weeks according accepted performance figures but clearly no more one or two days) should be done on Starfleet or civilian transport vessels capable of at least Warp 7 (Bajor to Cardassia in ~ 3 days without shortcuts, Bajor to Earth ~ 30 days without shortcuts). Any thoughts? Shamrock Holmes
Runabouts have the capacity to have bunks and living areas installed in the aft compartment, so I don't think comfort is really going to be a huge problem (and Officers often have to make do with less, except on diplomatic missions) Shuttlepods on the other hand are absurd for anything but ship to ship or planetside travel. It strains credability that LaForge took one to Risa instead of a nice, roomy shuttle like the one Picard got in Samaritan Snare. At least that had standing space!
I think the almost-quoted top speed of warp five for the runabouts ought to be fine for medium range interstellar transit - the small size of the craft would show in things like endurance (how many such trips in a month without refueling, how many such trips back to back without "cooling down") and the ability to choose one's targets (mainly charted destinations for the craft with their poor sensors). Conversely, shuttles shouldn't be credited with more than warp two, which as such is a valid interstellar speed anyway (freighters as late as TOS made do with that). The Type 9 shuttlecraft was quoted with warp four in VOY "Resolutions", but that was an unseen type, and might have been much larger than most (the TNG Tech Manual shows it to be an almost runabout-sized "cargo shuttle" with runabout-sized nacelles). What we see of runabout and shuttle performance appears more or less acceptable to me, with just a couple of exceptions. Runabouts aren't credited with especially long distance or long duration travel as such; if there are long assignments, they seem to involve long stays or multiple short hops. But then there's DS9 "Defiant" where Bashir seems to be saying it takes a runabout less than a week to get from Bajor to Vulcan and perhaps back, which rather thoroughly defeats the idea of DS9 being "in the frontier". Shuttles in turn seldom are seen in interstellar transit. Nearly every instance that looks like that can instead be interpreted as the mothership dropping the shuttle off near the target system. When our TNG heroes shuttle from and to their mothership on various conference tours and holidays, it is either by unseen (and possibly larger) craft, or then with this "dropped off by" caveat. In "Mind's Eye", the "dropped off by somebody else than the mothership" concept is even made explicit, and not treated as unusual at all. In general, though, I'm definitely happier when runabouts and shuttles are credited with poor propulsive performance. OTOH, I put no weight on the "official" values of warp factors, which are always way too low compared with onscreen evidence, so e.g. Bajor->Cardassia should consistently be hours at warp five, rather than days. But it doesn't follow that 10x(Bajor->Cardassia) ought to take 10x(the hours needed for Bajor->Cardassia). In all warp travel, long distances should involve slower average speeds than short distances, due to the apparent need for pit stops, cooldown periods, the need to get one's bearings and whatnot; this is how the big starships all (and Voyager especially) behave, after all. Timo Saloniemi
In both cases, the trip took place at sublight speed, according to the starfield view. So this would be part of the "dropped off by" concept. We have seen starships slow down to impulse when approaching certain systems such as Earth or Bajor, even in extreme emergencies. If somebody is going to be stuck in the sublight molasses, then it makes sense for this to be a shuttle rather than the mothership... Timo Saloniemi
I kind of agree with the OP, seeing dedicated, large capacity, high speed transports (cruise ships) would have been really good and would have come off as practical. Considering the importance of DS9, it would have been interesting seeing people movers and not just cargo movers. However, the Runabout is probably the most sensible long endurance small craft we have seen. It is big enough for a head as well as bunks. None of the shuttles have space for a head, unless they use transporter toilets, drugs, or diapers. Then again, maybe the length wise benches on some of the shuttles hide heads under the cushions. If these shuttles were warp 9 capable then I might not be so concerned by the lack of a toilet. In "Year of Hell" 7 of 9 says the time ship is too heavy to exceed warp 7, so weight plays a factor in warp speed, but power must too. I don't really have a point with this, I just found it curious in relation to light craft like shuttles.
The Delta Flyer was frequently used for survey missions which lasted weeks or even months at a time, was it not? Runabouts and the Flyer are bigger 'shuttles' anyway with better armaments - though realistically, I don't think the shuttles would have pitiful defensive/offensive systems either. The Type 9 was indeed mentioned of being capable of Warp 4... I would imagine those were the sleeker looking shuttles we saw from third season onward (one of which was destroyed in Day of Honour). The Delta Flyer however has an unspecified top warp factor... as far as my memory goes, though considering that thing had a combination of Borg and SF technologies, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine it would be capable of matching some larger ships in Warp speed and also sustain it - it was designed for such tasks from the get go... standard shuttles however were likely not.
RE: shuttlecraft/shuttlepods in deep space Please forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but do the smaller shuttles (in any era) come equipped with sufficient water, food prep, and toilet facilities to sustain any voyage of more than a few hours? If not, that could be a major problem... RE: Runabout / Delta Flyer I don't know how fast a Runabout or Delta Flyer could go in the TNG/post-TNG era, but at least they seem to have some limited internal capacity to sustain their personnel on an extended voyage. The real question there is whether it would make more sense to dispatch at least a somewhat larger starship, presumably capable of sustaining higher warp velocities, for the duration of a voyage. (If a Runabout can only manage Warp 5, would it not be more practical to use a starship that can at least cruise at Warp 6, 7 or 8?)
Even in our world, most long range flights are big, fairly fast planes, but these may only ply between the main hubs. With a wide range of craft of varying sizes, seating capacity, speeds, etc that connect a number of smaller, regional destinations to one of the hubs. If you're in NYC and want to go to London, you have the pleasure and convenience of a single direct flight on a big roomy jet. But if you want to from Owensboro KY to a small town in the North of England, you are looking at multiple stops. A smaller, regional, shorter range plane, possibly with propellers, takes you from KY to a larger hub. At the hub, you can get a big trans Atlantic roomy jet that takes you most of the way. Then you board another much smaller craft to take you to your final destination. We can imagine something similar with interstellar travel within the vast Federation. Something like a runabout sized ship, or a large passenger shuttle might be what takes people to and from the big hubs to the surrounding regional destinations.
It is. The FAA has a system for Airport designations by number of passengers boarding per year. Large Hub (Ex = New York City, Chicago, LA) Medium Hub (Ex = Louisville KY, Buffalo, Cleveland) Small Hub (Ex = Albany NY, Boise, El Paso) Non Hubs (Ex = Bismarck ND, Paducah KY) You will see this pattern in your flight itinerary if you live in a small town and want to fly long range or internationally. If you try to book your flight from Paducah to London, you see how they have it organized by which cities you have to fly to, to get your connecting flights. In each case you start from a smaller, shorter range craft, to larger, faster, roomier ones. Generally speaking. Paducah (non hub) to Louisville (medium hub) Louisville (medium hub) to Chicago (large hub) Chicago (large hub) to London UK (large hub). I assume Earth would be a very large hub. They might have huge, higher warp cruisers/liners flying non stop to other big hubs, like Betazed. But if your destination is some tiny, remote mining colony or small research station there might be some connecting flights on medium and small sized ships that take you to these smaller destinations once you've reached the nearest large hub.
Type 9 was never associated with any design, and the speedboatish shuttles often seen in VOY were never given any Type number - although they were apparently part of "Class 2", a number that seems to be different from the Type system. Backstage, the designers of the VOY shuttle actually considered it the Type 12. As for the hub-and-spokes system, it assumes relatively large passenger flows. If there are only a few passengers per route per day, it may be much better to dedicate a direct A-to-B high speed transport to them - and then reassign that to a completely different route the next day. In the sparsely populated frontier, ships would move on A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B-etc ring routes, making some passengers wait for a week for their flight but nevertheless saving time and resources: waiting for a week for a trip that takes a week is perfectly reasonable. Passenger ships of old operated on the ring route principle, there being very little hub-and-spokes sailing to support that service. Were ships to become the main means of intercontinental transport again today (say, with air travel banned by a master race of space dragons), hub-and-spokes still wouldn't make sense, as land traffic would now outpace ships in that role. It's all a game of speed, demand and capacity, and the rules have to change to accommodate new sets of parameters. Timo Saloniemi
Hub and spokes is how sea and land travel workas well. No bus goes to every city every where. No train does either. No ship does. You change trains or buses or ships for long routes and other destinations . Yes, the bus might make stops, but the Louisville to Pittsburgh bus, let say, only travels between Louisville and Pittsburgh. One hub to one hub. At that hub you change and get a new bus that takes you to NYC from Pittsburgh. This bus in turn only covers the stops on the Pitt to NYC, NYC to Pitt route. It never goes to Boston, LA l, Miami, Toronto, etc. You'll have to change again. At another hub. It was the same for ships at sea. No ship ever had literally every port in the whole world. They may make stops, but you had to catch connecting ships at various hubs to reach other destinations. It's hard to believe that volume of passengers wouldn't be higher at some places than others in the Federation. For all we know the daily volume might be far higher than the current airlines deal with. Or possibly not. But hub and spoke is how it would work, even if ships made stops, because hub and spoke isnt based on volume, only on the idea that no single bus, train or ship stops at literally every possible stop in the whole world. With something as vast as the Federation that would be even more true, not less. The number of flights leaving per day would vary considerably no doubt from place to place.
But that's not how it worked. You didn't catch another ship at a "hub", you caught it at a random node in a net of equal routes. And while the cargo of a ship might get distributed into barges at a port, and then to smaller boats later on, passengers would not travel by such barges or other successively lower-hierarchy ships to lower-hierarchy destinations. They would switch traveling modes altogether, or charter a direct boat in an at most two-level hierarchy of shipping. (In a different traveling mechanism altogether, barges would indeed be used by passengers as an expedient if slow method of travel. But not in feeder traffic.) Pre-steam shipping by and large resembled ring routes touching each other at various, often multiple points. Direct tither-and-yon "packet" services came later; steamship services meant sticking to coaling ports at regular intervals and and thus basically equalized the ports along the route, making the concept of hubs and hierarchies untenable. Well, in the Federation we see, we really can't tell. The closest thing to onscreen passenger services are those military transports of Sydney class (or her upside-down counterpart) visiting Bajor/DS9, but we get little idea of the actual passenger volumes or schedules involved. What we do learn is that the station is always pressed for evacuation resources (suggesting long intervals between ships) but always manages to evacuate anyway (suggesting low volumes). But we'd need more data on Bajor's status in the hierarchy of worlds and colonies to get useful information out of that. Why wouldn't a bus stop in every possible stop in the world? If it were fast enough, it could; if it were expensive enough, it would have to, because there would be no buses to spare for feeder routes. Starships are fast (Kasidy Yates' old tramp served several star systems on a circuit taking mere hours in "For the Cause", and passengers might demand even better and get it). But starships are expensive, too. Even if the Fed sphere of influence featured a thousand ports of call, those might be best served by a thousand liners that operate on ring routes of equal-value ports, rather than by the tens of thousands of ships needed in a hub-and-spokes setup. Today, hub-and-spokes uses dissimilar vehicles, the feeders often being cheaper out of necessity of quantity. Cheaper in practice means slower, at least for aircraft and ships. Why would there exist a market for slow starliners? A fast one could trump those with a direct service that flexibly responded to an increased volume on a particular route or node. But that doesn't mean hubs and spokes. That only means that some nodes in the network of equal ports are "multiply degenerate", that is, several equal routes go through them while fewer go through other locations. Such a network could be argued to consist purely of feeders, really. Timo Saloniemi
Timo, No they changed ships back in days of passenger sea service. Yeah they did. No ship went to every port on Earth. Yes they may also board a riverboat to take them up the river, or a ferry boat, or a stage coach or rail for inland travel, but that's the point. There were hubs and spokes just like there are today. Rail, bus, ship and plane work on the same principle. And ships, rail, ferries, riverboats and stage coach worked the same way in the 19th century. If you lived in a small harbor town, there would be no transatlantic service there. There might be a ferry, riverboat or smaller passenger ship that takes you to a hub where you can get a transatlantic booking. But they didn't stop at literally every coastal town everywhere. They all used hub and spoke, then and now. It would be even more necessary in the immense Federation. The reason that every mode of transit follows this system is that it's far easier and more effecient. And allows far, far faster point to point travel. Maybe a ship on the Earth-Betazed run connects to a Betazed-Trill ship, and I am looking to get to Trill from Earth. Easy breezy. Stopping at all 147 other member world's and hundreds of other destinations over thousands of light years is better? Not even close. Far, far faster to make zig zag node to node hops. Why have slower ships in the system at all? Because they can cover shorter distances in reasonable times and are way, way cheaper. Big fast jets cost far, far more than smaller, slower turboprobs. Sure they take longer, but not too long for short hops, and the system is massively faster for point to point travel than a crazy bonkers system of every ship stopping every where, every time.
We really seem to be speaking past each other here. I never promoted a system where a ship would stop at every port - I describe a system where separate, equal routes intercept at random locations, none of which can be considered a hub. Which is how mass transit within cities works, far more typically than not. There are no bus hubs, no tram hubs - just criscossing routes and opportunities for hopping from one line to another. And one element in this is that there are no vehicles that could travel faster than the buses and the trams, and there is no point in travelling slower - it's all equal. The same goes for ships - there were no fast ships vs. slow ships yesteryear. If anything, the "feeders" of shipping of yore were faster than the transoceanic vessels, even if ever-so-slightly. How do you get from Earth to Trill? By taking the fast ship that goes there. But there's nothing hubbish-and-spokeish about that. If there are destinations of interest between Earth and Trill, then the fast ship stops at those: stops have no a priori quality of being decisively time-consuming. If there are destinations with heavy passenger flows off the Earth-Trill route, then the passengers going there disembark at a suitable point and pick another fast ship that plies a different route. That way, more ports get served, faster, than if a single ship service worked back and forth between each individual destination, or if there were hubs where one had to change to a lower-level service. Hubs and spokes today are not a feature of efficient transit. They are a feature of multiple airlines competing for the passengers. A hub is the creation of an airline that loathes the idea of efficient and equal transit between random locations, as the airline doesn't want anybody to switch to the services of a non-associated airline at the otherwise most convenient Newark on their way from Stockholm to Chicago- it wants the passenger to specifically switch at Denver where he's forced to use the feeder associated with the airline. A much more efficient network would involve optimized hopping from fast line to fast line - optimized for the overall passenger volumes, not those of individual airlines. And such a net would probably kill most feeder lines, as those can only bring profit when pooled around hubs. But then again, the need for feeders would be diminished when more equally distributed desinations were served by the fast jets. Ultimately, though, feeder traffic would have to move off aircraft, no matter how cheap those are in comparison with the fast jets. Timo Saloniemi
Tsk, tsk, Miliarium Aureum, "All roads lead to Rome" and all that. Those crazy Romans, inventing the feeder system to, you know, feed its Empire. ----- In truth, hubs are the intersection of efficiency and economic infrastructure. True in the construction of highway systems, rail systems and computer network systems. Also true in water transportation systems, and like other systems, they must be navigable by the traffic using them. So even if there was no planned concentrations, natural harbors and navigable rivers did produce them. We call them ports.
Hubs exist in all transit systems. They are not some scam cooked up by airlines. LOL. Some cities are huge and have vastly greater traffic than tiny small towns, so they are hubs of multiple forms of transit that converge from all directions. That's what makes sense and is most effecient. Even within a city some destinations have far heavier traffic than others. The business district, the city center, universities or large malls. Many different routes and transit lines converge on these areas and are obvious points for transferring to other lines. Ships, buses, planes and trains run on routes. Any one craft goes back and forth and back and fourth over those same stops again and again. They connect to other routes, and these in turn connect to still others and yes, you hop from line to line, and many connections are not major hubs themselves. But there are hubs. Places where you can switch between several convergent subway, bus, commuter and long distance rail lines from that one point. Every street in every city, everywhere doesn't have that. 42nd St in Manhattan does, but not Elm Street in Nowhere, IN. Nor should it. Every point in the system is not equal. And shouldn't be. You seem to have some weird bias against short and medium range aircraft. If you have to take a 50 minute flight from Louisville KY to Chicago on a medium range, mid size jet to catch the larger jumbo jet that goes Chicago to London UK, what is the problem with that? Small, non hub regional airports have smaller aircraft, because there are far fewer people traveling to and from there per day. The trips to bigger connecting hubs are quick hops. Easy breezy. Smaller, far cheaper aircraft making quick short range hops.
And such smaller aircraft don't require extensive airport facilities and reinforced runways in order to operate. Economic infrastructure. You can't land an Airbus 380 just anywhere, you know.
I really like this idea. Like, a warp 7-9 passenger liner takes you to a star system, and then an airliner-sized warp 4 transport takes you to your final destination world. After that, there is the possibility of either a hypersonic transport or teleportation to take you to the city you want to visit. For example, you want to visit a family on Bajor that a family member in Starfleet has made friends with. So you get in your hovercar, and make your way to a transport network, and get teleported to the station or berth that your passenger liner is docked with (previous generations might use shuttles). Once the passenger liner makes it to the Bajor system, a warp 4-6 Boeing liner docks with the transport, and takes you directly to Bajor, or docks with a station, which beams you down to the surface. After that, you're just a hovercar ride or transport away from from the specific town or city.
Exactly. And that's fine. Look I've been on Jumbos down to several small turboprops types, and it's fine. When I looked out and saw the propellers on our little plane I didnt think "OMG! Propellers?!? What is this, 1940? Get me out of this thing! " Lol. These are not old pieces of junk. These are new, modern turboprops, that are quite fast. OK a comparable small jet would be a little faster, but for short range flights, it's fine. You don't feel "unequal" or inferior.