Throughout the series, I have seen shuttles destroyed or being missed, yet there are always new shuttles. How can Voyager have so many of them? Voyager is not that big a ship.
It's a long-standing grumble. They must have been regularly building new ones from replicated parts. From a geekish point of view, this is a problem because Voyager has to restrict replicator use. More importantly, it's weak scripting to simply blow shuttles left right and centre as a false climax, rather than, say, making an issue out of the need to preserve them, and the knock-on effects of losing one.
Well, Weak scripting is one of the known faults with Voyager, I have heard that from other people and I discovered myself that characters often suddenly appear to act different from episode to episode.
As many as the plot required them too. The shuttlecraft factory on Deck 14 was churning them out at five a day so they had plenty to spare
Maybe Voyager just had an entire crew of Emergency Repair Holograms who were just never featured on screen.
They had as many as the scripts called on them to have. But has been noted above this is one of those critisims that VOY gets, the seemingly endless supply of shuttles and the story opportunies that a lack of shuttles and how they are used/not used could have generated
Thry had infinity shuttles in a magical, shape-shifting TARDIS of a shuttlebay. I'll never forget how I laughed when they pulled Neelix's old ship our their asses pretending it'd been in there the whole time
"Voyager" had plenty of problems, but I never understood why the shuttles was supposed to be one of them. They have replicators. They have 100 crewman we barely see. They trade with aliens and search space for supplies and materials they can use. Clearly they have teams of yellowshirts building new shuttles consistently. Not that hard to come to that conclusion.
They obviously had the resources to build otherwise they would not have been able to design and construct the Delta Flyers/s.
A shuttle is a rather complex peice of eqipment when say comapred against a Photon torpedeo, and we are told they have NO way to replace those so by extension they can't replace shuttles. Yes we saw them building not 1 but 2 delta flyers and having endless supplies of torpedeos but the writers could have and should have done a much better job of explaining how they got around a self imposed limitation. If you read a book or series of books and are told in a chapter or earlier book that they can't do this and they do it, you gnerally expect an explanation as to why.
They keep 8 shuttles in the hangar bay and shuttle bay. They lost about ten throughout the series. Like an army motor pool, when a vehicle is lost, it needs to be replaced to maintain mission readiness and keep the 8. Maybe they adjusted that with the addition of the Delta Flyer, so say: 1 Delta flyer, 2 of the larger shuttles, and 4 of the 2-man shuttles, as well as any shuttlepods, if they carried them, and "workerbees" for maintanence.
My joke answer is they had instant shuttle kits. Just add water and grow a new one. My serious answer is they must have had dedicated team for shuttle construction/maintainance and reclamation.
. . . Or, they could use the technology from TAS' "Practical Joker" episode and have a fleet of inflatable shuttles!