Can shuttlecrafts go to warp?

[matthunter]

Similarly, post-TOS Trek (Voyager aside) never did the TOS thing where it would take three weeks to get a reply back from Starfleet Command; you could always just dial up Earth and talk to an admiral in seconds, no matter where you were in the quadrant. The idea of not having routine interconnection to anywhere in known civilization just doesn't occur to people anymore.

Untrue, though you're right about weeks. There are several TNG eps where a transmission delays of hours or days is in place. Quick example - The Defector. Picard has to wait several hours to get advice from an Admiral and later to confirm Jarok's identity.

We can chalk that up to improvements in subspace comms tech. IIRC, the tech manuals mention that late 24th Century comms can transmit at Warp 9.99+ (the only limit being range and thus the need for subspace relays).

 

[Sgt_G]

Quick example - The Defector. Picard has to wait several hours to get advice from an Admiral and later to confirm Jarok's identity.

Is that a factor of transmission times, or a factor of the time it takes for a bureaucratic answer???

 

[matthunter]

Is that a factor of transmission times, or a factor of the time it takes for a bureaucratic answer???

Hey, Admirals are very busy people. No wonder some of them go insane.

 

[Unicron]

Maxwell also says in "The Wounded" that if he had reported his suspicions to Starfleet, the bureaucrats would have spent months debating what to do without doing anything useful.

 

[Timo]

Untrue, though you're right about weeks. There are several TNG eps where a transmission delays of hours or days is in place. Quick example - The Defector. Picard has to wait several hours to get advice from an Admiral and later to confirm Jarok's identity.

It's also oddly implicit in DSC that checking with HQ is not an option, even when we can easily see this is simply because the writers didn't want such contact and didn't bother with inventing a reason for that. In-universe, we probably have to plead comms delay.

We can chalk that up to improvements in subspace comms tech. IIRC, the tech manuals mention that late 24th Century comms can transmit at Warp 9.99+ (the only limit being range and thus the need for subspace relays).

Might also well be the Romulans are being difficult there, jamming subspace the best they can (think the Koreas and the blaring loudspeakers at the border); both our 23rd and 24th century examples of delays have this RNZ emphasis...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

The one thing that interests me, outside the technological question of whether shuttle can go to warp is, from a story telling perspective should they be able to warp? I can see arguments both ways: shuttles not having warp is a good storytelling limitation from which conflict can be derived when trying to come up with an story idea, and having some kind of limitation helps stave off the question of "why send a ship when you can send a shuttle". On the other hand, having warp makes sense in a way, because otherwise practically speaking journeys would take too long and the shuttle might not be as useful a auxiliary craft (for instance you couldn't use it like Voyager does in The Raven to sneak into hostile territory), which would constrain story telling and if the journey is significant enough also hurt suspension of disbelief. Thoughts, everyone?

Good storytelling doesn't need to have artificial limitations because it would be made in such a way to WORK with the established setting instead.
Examples of bad artificial limitations would be when Trek writers decided to just make certain technologies not work 'just because' - despite the premise of having almost endless redundancies to compensate for exactly those scenarios, or simply forgetting that technology in a scifi setting can easily do certain things.

To me it would be incredibly dumb for shuttles NOT to have Warp capability.
Technology and science (especially for a spacefaring combination of societies like the Federation) would evolve on an exponential basis.
In mere decades we could downsize supercomputers to something that can fit in your hand and also greatly surpass them in performance and efficiency... it stands to reason in the Federation, it would be more than doable to do that with Warp drive on a shuttle (actually, the Federation should have had much more developed science and technology by those metrics compared to what we saw).

Plus, TNG did showcase a probe (Torpedo shell) racing towards Enterprise-D at over Warp 9 (the emissary episode I think).

More to the point, if we go by Discovery, the shuttles of that era (mid 23rd century) could achieve Warp 1 (or 2 - depends really because Burnham was able to get Spock to Talos pretty fast, so I'd imagine it would need to be faster than Warp 1)... comparatively, in the late 24th century, Voyager's Type 9 shuttlecrafts had a speed of Warp 4.

The Delta Flyer (which was designed by Voyager crew) I think was able to achieve Warp 6 (and was also modified to achieve Slipstream too) - though it sported a number of different design approaches and technologies compared to standard Starfleet shuttles.

I'd like to see Trek telling good stories that work with the established setting without dumbing things down or artificially restricting technological capability for the sake of 'drama'.

 

[Christopher]

Good storytelling doesn't need to have artificial limitations because it would be made in such a way to WORK with the established setting instead.

If by "artificial" you mean arbitrary, sure. But if a limitation is plausible and arises organically out of the physics, engineering, or logistics of the situation, then it can be a good thing from a storytelling perspective, because it's good to create obstacles for the characters in the pursuit of their goals. For instance, it's often necessary to prevent the characters from just beaming up out of danger, and there are plausible ways to prevent it that are natural outgrowths of the technology -- for instance, if their communicators are taken so the ship can't lock onto their location, or if there are shields in the way.

To me it would be incredibly dumb for shuttles NOT to have Warp capability.
Technology and science (especially for a spacefaring combination of societies like the Federation) would evolve on an exponential basis.
In mere decades we could downsize supercomputers to something that can fit in your hand and also greatly surpass them in performance and efficiency... it stands to reason in the Federation, it would be more than doable to do that with Warp drive on a shuttle (actually, the Federation should have had much more developed science and technology by those metrics compared to what we saw).

I don't agree. Moore's Law is not a universal; some things can't be as easily miniaturized as others. Warping spacetime is an incredibly difficult thing that requires immense amounts of energy or mass, so it's plausible that you'd need sufficiently large mechanisms and power generation systems to pull it off. Of course, Star Trek has (once again) always shown that shuttlecraft in the 23rd and 24th century are capable of interstellar travel and therefore must have warp capability, but I've always found it implausible that warp drive could be miniaturized to that degree. In general terms, it's not unreasonable to posit a universe where there's a minimum practical size for an FTL engine, dictated by fundamental physics and engineering limitations. Indeed, there are a number of SF universes where FTL travel requires large, stationary apparatus, like Babylon 5's jump gates, or massive natural phenomena, like the collapsars (black holes) of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. (Or there's my own Hub universe, where the titular Hub, a space warp at the galaxy's center of mass from which all points in the galaxy are instantly accessible, is the only means of FTL travel ever discovered. That limitation and its consequences are the source of most of the plots in the series.)

At the very least, there's no reason you couldn't set your story at a point in the development of the technology where the means to miniaturize it further hasn't been developed yet, as in the Enterprise era when shuttlepods were strictly sublight.

It can certainly be narratively useful to make FTL a limited resource for your characters. For instance, a story where the FTL drive is in danger of failure or destruction has higher stakes if the crew has no backup. Or if only really large ships are capable of FTL, you can design a fleet built around a carrier model, where a large FTL-capable ship carries smaller, more multipurpose ships to their destinations. Limitations in fiction are not dumb; they're opportunities to be creative, by showing how your characters adapt to those limitations.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, scifi can't exist except through inventing its own limitations.

If it introduces X, the floodgates are opened, and it then has to specifically introduce a limitation on Y at least, and preferably on Z as well, or it should logically follow that Kirk can fly, rewind time, and resurrect into a different-looking person.

Not every single bit of futurism need be shot down in detail: if we learn that Y is not possible, we get a rough idea on what category of miracles these future folks cannot perform. X and Y together set the scene - but Y alone might work better than X alone, really.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Of course, Star Trek has (once again) always shown that shuttlecraft in the 23rd and 24th century are capable of interstellar travel and therefore must have warp capability, but I've always found it implausible that warp drive could be miniaturized to that degree. In general terms, it's not unreasonable to posit a universe where there's a minimum practical size for an FTL engine, dictated by fundamental physics and engineering limitations.

But even if the Warp Drives on Shuttle Craft are miniaturized, there are still limitations to it's Shuttle Craft "Platform" that a larger StarShip will just over shadow it with in performance.

Things like Range/Acceleration/Top Speed/ (Power Generation for Offense/Defense/Systems/Mobility)/etc will generally be better on a larger StarShip platform compared to Shuttles.

Even in the ST:VOY episode "Warhead", the Series 5 long-range tactical armor unit ran on a Condensed Energy Matrix (A fancy super dense battery) that could allow the small and agile projectile to travel 80 ly to it's target at reasonable Warp Speeds and still function as a WMD.

Just because the Warp Engines & Battery power source was "Miniaturized" doesn't mean it can perform on the same level as a Shuttle or Voyager.

Engineering & Design Requirements dictate how big your Platform & Power Source along with FTL capabilities.

But it doesn't translate 1 to 1 to a larger platform.

Things like "The volume of the Warp Field" would probably dictate power consumption due to how much "Space" you're moving FTL.

Smaller Volume "Warp Fields" would generally correlate, by way of logic, smaller amounts of power consumption, ergo you can get away with using a Smaller Warp Core or less Battery Capacity to get to your destination.

The same design limitations happens in Aviation and in Aircraft design.

Larger Aircraft are more "Fuel Efficient" in the sense of how many liters of fuel spent per kg per km.

While smaller Aircraft are more "Fuel Efficient" in the sense of total fuel consumed, but your cargo capacity is limited by the tiny air frame of a smaller Aircraft.

If you want the smaller Aircraft to carry the same Volume and Mass of cargo as the larger aircraft, you're going to have to waste alot of Fuel making trips back & forth and take longer to carry the same amount of total cargo.

Ergo each sized platform will have it's "Strengths & Weaknesses" based on it's natural design limitations and what you can fit in it, & get it moving, to cover the overall distance of your long trip.

Think of Airliners as analagous to "StarShips" and Automobiles as our personal "ShuttleCraft" in our real world.

Each one has it's purpose and Strengths/Weaknesses based on what it's designed to do.

 

[Christopher]

Even in the ST:VOY episode "Warhead", the Series 5 long-range tactical armor unit ran on a Condensed Energy Matrix (A fancy super dense battery) that could allow the small and agile projectile to travel 80 ly to it's target at reasonable Warp Speeds and still function as a WMD.

Any sufficiently powerful stardrive is automatically a WMD already. A shuttlecraft at high impulse hitting the Earth could do as much damage as the dinosaur-killer asteroid. A warp core is a huge antimatter bomb waiting to go off. The energies involved in relativistic or FTL travel are so enormous that they can't not be WMDs -- which is another reason why it's fanciful and problematical to treat FTL drives as compact and ubiquitous enough to be in small, single-operator craft.

Smaller Volume "Warp Fields" would generally correlate, by way of logic, smaller amounts of power consumption, ergo you can get away with using a Smaller Warp Core or less Battery Capacity to get to your destination.

Sometimes physics creates certain limitations that can't be circumvented. For instance, you can't launch a satellite into orbit with a model rocket. You need a really big and powerful rocket, multiple stories high, even to launch something as small as a CubeSat into orbit, because the power demand requires quite a lot of fuel. No matter how small the payload is, it's the size of the engine that creates the limitation. Make it too small and it's just not powerful enough to do the job.

And warping spacetime into an FTL metric is exponentially harder than launching a rocket into orbit. It would take immense amounts of power to create even a small warp bubble, and that would put limits on how small you could make the reactor in order to get the necessary power output.

That why it's not "dumb," as Deks put it, to postulate a minimum viable size for an FTL drive. If anything, it's more fanciful not to.

 

[Unicron]

It can certainly be narratively useful to make FTL a limited resource for your characters. For instance, a story where the FTL drive is in danger of failure or destruction has higher stakes if the crew has no backup. Or if only really large ships are capable of FTL, you can design a fleet built around a carrier model, where a large FTL-capable ship carries smaller, more multipurpose ships to their destinations. Limitations in fiction are not dumb; they're opportunities to be creative, by showing how your characters adapt to those limitations.

Battletech has occasionally toyed with elements of this over the years, as warships have become a bit of a fan joke in how they're utilized (the designers want to keep mechs as the "main" unit, so they've developed several plot lines to basically destroy large warship fleets for "balance" reasons ).

The concept of building monitor type vessels (warship type hulls with no motive drives, intended solely for planetary defense with the option of stronger weapons and armor) has been discussed, but the designers don't consider them viable mainly because they would be too potentially unbalanced (more room for arsenal means they could conceivably go toe to toe with the biggest warships easily) or they'd be too easily bypassed by invading forces (and have the opposite problem). The closest canon thing technically to this version of a monitor was several Naga class destroyers the Word of Blake used as heavily modified drone control ships during the Jihad, which they had salvaged and couldn't repair some systems. The Nagas had long since lost their ability to make FTL jumps, but did originally have that capacity so weren't technically monitors.

It's also worth remembering too that there's always a difference between what technology is capable of on paper and how it actually works in a real environment. After WWII, the U.S. armed forces stopped building aircraft with guns and other auxiliary weapons for a while because they were examining a new model of air warfare. This model accounted for several key developments that had occurred during that war:

1) The advent of jet technology for engines, which has advantages over piston engines and turbines. Faster speed around the world and more range among others.

2) The development of "smart" projectile technology, which at the time was evolving into the modern class of tracking weapons we use now.

3) The creation of very advanced weaponry like nuclear bombs, which had a destructive potential unlike any technology before, and which could be carried by improved bombers for long range strikes against enemies on another continent.

When these factors were combined, it led to the theory that modern fighters would no longer need to engage in dogfighting and close range tactics, and that their new role would instead focus mainly on intercepting enemy bombers or missiles in the event of a strike. Guns were seen as obsolete, along with the skills of a piloting for close quarters engagement. Then when the U.S. fought in both Korea and Vietnam, they realized these assumptions weren't quite accurate and that such backup weapons and skills were still essential. American pilots who ran out of missiles or simply had ones that were not reliable (as sometimes happened) could be outclassed by communist pilots who were still being trained in traditional dogfighting and had guns.

So that led to the creation of the Top Gun school which teaches those essential skills. And it's also true that even though modern soldiers have access to a variety of powerful ranged weapons, they also train to use shorter ranged ones and for physical combat even if the odds of needing those tools is considerably lower. Every advantage is a good one.

I'd imagine there would be any number of fictional examples of practical limitations, even if at times it's just a failed prototype that needs some kinks worked out. The Defiant is certainly one example of such a design, which proved quite effective when its design limitations were improved.

 

[Redshirt214]

I tend to think that limitations are good for introducing points of conflict, as others have pointed out. It forces writers and characters to think and act rather than rely on the magitech to save them.

Are there any shuttles that consistently can't do warp? Even the shuttlepods seem to have been able to do it in the TNG era, or would have to thanks to the interstellar travel involved. As, well, not very pretty, as the Shuttlepods are I can't help but think they make more sense for smaller ships like the Defiant, Oberth, Nova, and maybe even Voyager to carry than full shuttles, especially if the ships mission isn't long term exploration. It'd take up less space onboard and be suited for those "oops the transporter broke" moments without needing to be too sophisticated which would be useful where space is a permium. I could also see ships like the Lantree having more work pods than shuttles with a goal of moving cargo being more important to the mission. Presumably work bees can't do warp, although whether or not they can move through an atmosphere is an interesting question.

 

[Christopher]

Are there any shuttles that consistently can't do warp?

22nd-century shuttlepods in ENT weren't warp-capable.

Even the shuttlepods seem to have been able to do it in the TNG era, or would have to thanks to the interstellar travel involved.

When the Type 15 shuttlepod debuted in "Time Squared," it was explicitly stated not to be warp-capable. That seemed to get overlooked in later seasons, probably in cases where the script specified a shuttlecraft but the production team went with the shuttlepod mockup for convenience.

Presumably work bees can't do warp, although whether or not they can move through an atmosphere is an interesting question.

I profoundly doubt it. Not what they're designed for.

And I wouldn't call a work bee a shuttlecraft. It's more of a space forklift. A shuttle, by definition, is meant for moving back and forth between different places, e.g. ship to shore or ship to ship. Work bees are only meant to operate over a short distance, in the immediate vicinity of the ship or dock facility they're based in.

 

[Redshirt214]

All salient points. Now that you mention it I suppose Enterprise managed for once not to be inconsistent about the whole "no warp for the shuttle pod" thing unlike in TNG. Enterprises' shuttlepod always seemed more shuttle than pod to me, but nomenclature aside looks like a real ship we could build with todays tech.

Regarding the point about Work Bees and atmospheres, I misread the Memory Alpha page:
"The CMU could operate both in the vacuum of space and within the atmospheric and gravitational conditions of a starship cargo bay or planetary surface. (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)"
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cargo_management_unit.

So evidently the Work Bee can fly though atmospheres as long as it's low level flight, a side effect of being able to fly through a air filled shuttle or cargo bay too. They can't go through an upper atmosphere though, so if the Enterprise-D picked one up from Relva, either they did so from an unseen space station or they must have beamed it on board via a cargo transporter (which would actually be pretty cool).

 

[Christopher]

So evidently the Work Bee can fly though atmospheres as long as it's low level flight, a side effect of being able to fly through a air filled shuttle or cargo bay too. They can't go through an upper atmosphere though

I'd say just the opposite. Since they're normally based in space and only capable of short-range travel, a brief dip in the upper reaches of a planet's atmosphere is probably the best they could manage. I doubt they're designed to handle the stresses of re-entry, since you don't need to deal with those kinds of forces and temperatures in a hangar bay.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Any sufficiently powerful stardrive is automatically a WMD already. A shuttlecraft at high impulse hitting the Earth could do as much damage as the dinosaur-killer asteroid. A warp core is a huge antimatter bomb waiting to go off. The energies involved in relativistic or FTL travel are so enormous that they can't not be WMDs -- which is another reason why it's fanciful and problematical to treat FTL drives as compact and ubiquitous enough to be in small, single-operator craft.

Yet in VOY, it was shown that the Series 5 long-range tactical armor unit was incredibly small, only a bit past 1 meters in length and required 2x crewmen to carry.

The compact nature and the "Battery" powered FTL drive allowed it to be very tiny and efficient at it's purpose.

That tiny frame wouldn't be able to fit a reactor worth a damn, but having superior batteries allowed it to cover 80 ly is amazing in itself in terms of engineering.

Sometimes physics creates certain limitations that can't be circumvented. For instance, you can't launch a satellite into orbit with a model rocket. You need a really big and powerful rocket, multiple stories high, even to launch something as small as a CubeSat into orbit, because the power demand requires quite a lot of fuel. No matter how small the payload is, it's the size of the engine that creates the limitation. Make it too small and it's just not powerful enough to do the job.

I concur, there are minimal size & volumes for reactors to generate enough power for FTL / STL drives, it's proven in Star Trek already based on existing designs and the size of each platforms reactors.

And warping spacetime into an FTL metric is exponentially harder than launching a rocket into orbit. It would take immense amounts of power to create even a small warp bubble, and that would put limits on how small you could make the reactor in order to get the necessary power output.

That's why Reactor / Battery size must be chosen wisely for the size of the platform you plan on moving =D

That why it's not "dumb," as Deks put it, to postulate a minimum viable size for an FTL drive. If anything, it's more fanciful not to.

I concur, the minimal possible size for a "Reactor-based" FTL platform is probably small Shuttle Craft size like the Aeon TimeShip.

For "Battery-powered" with limited range, it can be smaller, the size of slightly past 1 meter in length with a very limited range in ly.

That's already "Good enough" by many metrics.

 

[Timo]

Random notes about specific craft:

1) The Type 15 shuttlepod in "Time Squared" is incapable of warp. This is a plot point - but possibly also an anomaly. That is, the warp drive of the craft may have been damaged, thus allowing the main heroes to first speculate on warp-based time travel techniques and only then decide this won't work.

2) Then again, we never see the pod type at warp.

3) Then again again, we never see any TNG craft at warp, not in TNG at any rate. No known type is even stated to be at warp off screen - only the unknown type from "Skin of Evil" is.

4) Then again again again, a compact Type 18 shuttlepod has warp engines and apparently goes interstellar in a couple of DS9 episodes, so miniaturization is unlikely to be a problem here.

5) Khan's hut in ST2:TWoK was a workbee cargo train, complete with the spine and the workbee adapter. No bee there, though - and Kirk would probably have made damn sure Khan had no access to a spacecraft of any sort. So perhaps the bee lowered the train to the surface and then left? Or then the spine held the containers together when they were gravidropped to the surface, and no bee was involved? In either case, the bee alone might have been incapable of atmospheric flight or orbital ascent; beaming it off the train would have been an option.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

That why it's not "dumb," as Deks put it, to postulate a minimum viable size for an FTL drive. If anything, it's more fanciful not to.

Cochran's Warp Drive ship was three person, about the size of half a ballistic missile. Technology level: mid-21st century. Add two to three hundred years of development, and I'm sure a FTL ship would get smaller and more capable.

 

[Timo]

Then again, aircraft the size (dimensions, weight) of the Wright Flyer aren't all that much more capable than the early contraption. We might just as well postulate some inherent difficulties there.

The thing is, though, those aren't showstoppers: small warp craft assuredly are a thing in the 23rd century Federation. And in the 22nd century starfaring community outside the Federation, at the very least. So we need separate rationalization for why all small craft wouldn't be warp-capable, especially in Starfleet which considers all shuttlecraft about as indispensable as toilet paper and obviously doesn't sweat expenses.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Yet in VOY, it was shown that the Series 5 long-range tactical armor unit was incredibly small, only a bit past 1 meters in length and required 2x crewmen to carry.

Yes, again, it is obvious that Star Trek has routinely portrayed warp drives as very small. But Star Trek is not the entirety of fiction or the entirety of scientific speculation. It is a tiny, tiny sliver of those things and there is a larger cultural and conceptual context that it occupies. My point is that, in general, it is not "dumb" to create a fictional universe in which there are practical limits on how small you can make an FTL drive. Many fictional universes have done just that, and it is an insult to their creators to call it "dumb." It is, in fact, more plausible than Trek's fancifully tiny warp drives.