Shuttlecraft Help
- Thread starter Nero's Shadow
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There's also the choice of inferring a standard shuttlecraft compliment from a line of dialog, or whipping up some complicated "they may have known the Exeter lost a dozen craft on their journeys" theory that has no basis in anything other than your own imagination. Going by Galloway's dialog, it can be interpreted as four craft being the standard compliment. It's not a hard and fast discussion ender, but it's solid enough evidence. But, then , why is there a 7 on the Galileo if there were supposed to be fewer than seven craft? Meh.
I prefer to stay away from "we don't know what happened to the Exeter before this episode" logic because all that really did happen was what was filmed.
I prefer to stay away from "we don't know what happened to the Exeter before this episode" logic because all that really did happen was what was filmed.
I have two thoughts on this subject and they're not really mutually exclusive.
!. The Enterprise may indeed have more than four or six or seven auxiliary craft if you include four shuttlecraft and a handful of workpods or workbees.
2. The Enterprise may have begun with four (or two) standard shuttlecraft and then as some were lost and replaced their registration numbers got higher. Hence why it's NCC-1701/7 rather than NCC-1701/4 or 1701/4B. The down side of this notion is that the Galileo II was also 1701/7. As such then my first idea might be more likely.
If that was the case then nobody needed to wear a spacesuit in any of the movies. Would like to have seen the guy do a backflip as Enterprise left spacedock without a suit.
That'd be an exception rather than the norm, but it sort of creates a connection between Kirk and that other famed explorer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau...
Granted that Cousteau had a wooden midget ship that never quite met his needs. But if STXI is to be believed, Kirk commanded a midget as well.
Possibly. But TAS and TOS-R offer enough evidence to complicate all the possible "systems" we might suggest. The Copernicus, NCC-1701/12, was a runabout-style craft capable of independent interstellar operations in "Slaver Weapon"; earlier this same registry had been assigned to the very different shuttle Harry Mudd stole and lost in "Mudd's Passion". The Columbus was given the registry NCC-1701/2 in the redone "TG7" IIRC - and this it shared with the aquashuttle of "Ambergris Element".
Possibly the ship always has a set number of shuttles, less than four, aboard - but a fleet of dozens is assigned to her, and mostly undergoes maintenance, repairs and overhaul at various starbases...
The life support belt probably had its limitations even in TAS, explaining why it saw so little use in general. It would be fine for short-term protection, but no serious vacuum worker would rely on that small belt buckle.
Really, the TAS forcefield suit is such an annoyance that I'm highly motivated to invent shortcomings and limitations for it to explain its later disappearance. Thankfully, in TAS, it mainly saw use in highly benign environments: inside (admittedly alien and damaged) starships, and on Class M worlds (or in their oceans). It was once worn on a dangerous asteroid, but probably at the insistence of the villain of the week: for his "hostage exhange", he wouldn't have wanted to see Kirk covered in a spacesuit that could also hide a phaser rifle or two spare redshirts...
Since we never hear of those TMP belt buckles having their supposed medical monitoring function, and since they, too, soon disappear, it would be a fun exercise to declare them life support belts. That wouldn't require them to ever see actual use - but if they did have this function, Kirk's final expedition outside his ship under V'Ger's rather dubious atmospheric protection would look less suicidal!
Timo Saloniemi
That crosses a line into contradicting known creator intent. It's like this line running around about why it's okay for the Kelvin to be ten times the size of the TOS Enterprise because "nobody ever said there weren't bigger ships around."
Yeah, nobody but whoever wrote the original series Writer's Guide and said that the class of starship that the Enterprise is our main example of "is the largest and most modern type vessel in the Starfleet Service."
Filling in blanks and expanding on things based on what we know now is one thing. Making out the original creators to be a bunch of know-nothing liars is another.
Yeah, nobody but whoever wrote the original series Writer's Guide and said that the class of starship that the Enterprise is our main example of "is the largest and most modern type vessel in the Starfleet Service."
Filling in blanks and expanding on things based on what we know now is one thing. Making out the original creators to be a bunch of know-nothing liars is another.
The "original creators" tend to be very small cogs in very big machinery, though. And to task them with carving the entire fictional universe in "That Which Survives" -hardness bedrock from the get-go seems grossly unfair.
Nothing in TOS hinged on the Enterprise being the biggest ship around, not even in it being the most modern. The drama could have played out well with our heroes flying a disgusting old rust bucket in the shittiest backwater assignments Starfleet could invent, and persevering, while newer, bigger and better ships achieved less elsewhere.
Nothing in TMP really suggested a functionality for those belt buckles, either. And frankly, the people who thought up the perscan functionality were on the wrong track: that's not plausible tech, either in light of TOS precedent or current developments. Even 1980s audiences could see something wrong with the lack of miniaturization, and something deeply disturbing with having a suspicious medical device resting on your tender lower abdomen. The whole philosophy also seemed off: our heroes should not be watched over by Big Brother all the time. Indeed, that would hamper drama, because one would then have to dream up explanations to how Spock could sneak around and steal a spacesuit while constantly being monitored!
Sure, one might say that our TMP heroes wore "spacesuits" which do have odd pieces of technology hanging from them today. But the heroes of TOS never wore "spacesuits" at routine work - they wore uniforms, which prominently lacked such spacesuitish features.
The shuttlecraft at least were intuitive tech, easily accepted by the audience in all their incarnations, because hey, it's a spaceship story. One has to accept the existence of funnily shaped spacecraft or one has to leave. Introducing fun concepts such as the warp sled (or Probert's other planned modular components) would have been an easy sale.
Timo Saloniemi
Nothing in TOS hinged on the Enterprise being the biggest ship around, not even in it being the most modern. The drama could have played out well with our heroes flying a disgusting old rust bucket in the shittiest backwater assignments Starfleet could invent, and persevering, while newer, bigger and better ships achieved less elsewhere.
Nothing in TMP really suggested a functionality for those belt buckles, either. And frankly, the people who thought up the perscan functionality were on the wrong track: that's not plausible tech, either in light of TOS precedent or current developments. Even 1980s audiences could see something wrong with the lack of miniaturization, and something deeply disturbing with having a suspicious medical device resting on your tender lower abdomen. The whole philosophy also seemed off: our heroes should not be watched over by Big Brother all the time. Indeed, that would hamper drama, because one would then have to dream up explanations to how Spock could sneak around and steal a spacesuit while constantly being monitored!
Sure, one might say that our TMP heroes wore "spacesuits" which do have odd pieces of technology hanging from them today. But the heroes of TOS never wore "spacesuits" at routine work - they wore uniforms, which prominently lacked such spacesuitish features.
The shuttlecraft at least were intuitive tech, easily accepted by the audience in all their incarnations, because hey, it's a spaceship story. One has to accept the existence of funnily shaped spacecraft or one has to leave. Introducing fun concepts such as the warp sled (or Probert's other planned modular components) would have been an easy sale.
Timo Saloniemi
Without those "small cogs in big machinery", you have no show. You dismiss their opinions at your peril, if you have any intention of coming up with anything that is going to resemble Star Trek at the end of the day.
Besides, how many times during the course of TOS was the Enterprise described as being one of the best ships in the fleet? The only time she was ever described as an old rust bucket was by Korax in "The Trouble With Tribbles", and we all know how that turned out.
Besides, how many times during the course of TOS was the Enterprise described as being one of the best ships in the fleet? The only time she was ever described as an old rust bucket was by Korax in "The Trouble With Tribbles", and we all know how that turned out.
^ I tend to agree. There's nothing in Galloway's "Omega Glory" line about the four shuttles that would preclude the possible standard starship compliment of four assembled, ready-to-launch shuttlecraft as part of normal starship operations, and also additional vehicles (and possibly other varieties, such as aquashuttles) stored as pre-fab kits in the ship's cargo holds.
As for the "where was the fourth shuttlecraft?" question in "The Galileo Seven", there's nothing in the episode to either support or refute the notion that a fourth shuttlecraft was actively a part of the search operation, or that perhaps the fourth shuttlecraft was "away" on another mission for the entire episode.
As for the "Enterprise is the biggest and best" issue bandied about in recent posts, IIRC, TOS' characters and also guest-characters like Starfleet admirals and dignitaries all looked to the Enterprise as the finest ship in the fleet, that she was the biggest, the best and most powerful asset in the Federation space arsenal. When you're carrying about 200 of the Federation elite to Babel on a mission of galactic importance, you don't send the second banana. Enterprise was clearly the top dog.
The notion of making the JJprise into another Battlestar Galactica with a cavernous shuttlebay doesn't make sense. If you're going to re-invent the franchise, why not try using a clean sheet of paper? It just doesn't make sense to rely on a single hangar to launch and recover all of those ships. What if something happened in the hangar? You wouldn't be able to launch or recover anything. It would've made more sense to place redundant hangars in the outer rim of the saucer. Looked like just another example of "Star Wars" / "Battlestar" envy. TOS never had to imitate anything else; of course, there was little else around to imitate (sci fi wise) back then.
As for the "where was the fourth shuttlecraft?" question in "The Galileo Seven", there's nothing in the episode to either support or refute the notion that a fourth shuttlecraft was actively a part of the search operation, or that perhaps the fourth shuttlecraft was "away" on another mission for the entire episode.
As for the "Enterprise is the biggest and best" issue bandied about in recent posts, IIRC, TOS' characters and also guest-characters like Starfleet admirals and dignitaries all looked to the Enterprise as the finest ship in the fleet, that she was the biggest, the best and most powerful asset in the Federation space arsenal. When you're carrying about 200 of the Federation elite to Babel on a mission of galactic importance, you don't send the second banana. Enterprise was clearly the top dog.
The notion of making the JJprise into another Battlestar Galactica with a cavernous shuttlebay doesn't make sense. If you're going to re-invent the franchise, why not try using a clean sheet of paper? It just doesn't make sense to rely on a single hangar to launch and recover all of those ships. What if something happened in the hangar? You wouldn't be able to launch or recover anything. It would've made more sense to place redundant hangars in the outer rim of the saucer. Looked like just another example of "Star Wars" / "Battlestar" envy. TOS never had to imitate anything else; of course, there was little else around to imitate (sci fi wise) back then.
Indeed, since TOS-R chooses to show us VFX of the Columbus physically returning all the way to the ship when dialogue merely indicates the shuttle has "returned from searching quadrant X" and is going to tackle another quadrant next, we might wonder why our heroes would deliberately create gaps in their survey of the planet's surface. Surely the shuttle wouldn't need to fly back into the hangar between these sorties? But if the ship is in fact operating three shuttles, it becomes quite possible that the Columbus is allowed to have a pit stop while the Voltaire and the Bugs Bunny continue their laps.
Which characters?
The only time Kirk suggested his ship would be exceptional was in "Immunity Syndrome" - and only because her crew was. The admission came after lots of prompting, and was intended to raise badly sagging morale. The episode had started with Kirk admitting that a previous starship that had been equal in capabilities to their own had failed in her quest.
Scotty got all excited about the Enterprise in "Trouble with Tribbles", but never claimed she was the best - merely that she shouldn't be derided as the worst.
Commodore Stone considered Kirk an important fella because he commanded a starship, but he never made remarks about the size of Kirk's ship. That might have hurt.
The other Commodores and Admirals didn't assess the relative or absolute standing of Kirk's ship. The various civilian officials aboard paid no attention to the capabilities of the ship.
She was the ship considered worth expending on an expedition to the Galactic Barrier; the ship rigged with M-5 for testing a risky new concept; the ship that fought at the backwater Organia in the supposed Next Big One. One wouldn't expect any of that from a Home Fleet battleship, but a light cruiser built for colonial patrol would be a prime candidate for those jobs. And if she happened to be available for shuttling delegates, no doubt as part of a big fleet of space limos (since 114 delegates is not all that much for an important interstellar conference), she could handle that job as well - even if it meant displacing the Captain from his usual cabin and accommodating him on Deck 5 because his small ship lacked proper VIP facilities. Accommodating even a single delegate and her small troupe meant shuffling cabins in "Elaan of Troyius" already!
OTOH, all this evidence can be turned the other way if one needs to defend the "she was the biggest of them all" theory. We simply don't have major incentive to choose either side here. Personally, I prefer to think of Kirk Prime's ship as representing the second-biggest starship category, with the big bulls staying close to home like the battleships of late, and with these workhorses getting all the "interesting" assignments. (Also, I personally like to think that the STXI ships were of roughly comparable size, too - the only cog in the wheels of that is comparison with nuKirk's ship, and the size of that ship is highly variable from shot to shot... So I favor the <400m rather than the >700m version until further notice. But that's a different matter.)
But it's no more cavernous in relation to the rest of the ship than Kirk Prime's bay was. We already have to cope with the fact that the TOS bay could house twenty shuttles if properly stowed and stacked, yet was never seen accommodating more than one (or two in TOS-R, or six in TAS). Filling the volume every now and then is IMHO a good way of coping; perhaps there were reasons why the TOS bay was exceptionally empty every time we saw it?
Timo Saloniemi
Have you actually seen a properly scaled drawing of the hangar deck? It's a pretty cozy situation with two shuttles, and even stacking them on top of each other and filling the entire flight deck, you'd be pushing it to fit ten shuttles in there, and under those conditions, the entire flight deck would be unusable.
Indeed, the concept in TOS was always that the shuttles were stored and maintained one level below the "hangar deck," which should properly have been called the "flight deck." That's why the turntable was also an elevator.
In "The Doomsday Machine", Kirk mentioned that Matt Decker was in command of the Constellation. In "The Ultimate Computer", Bob Wesley commanded the task force with the Lexington as his flag ship. If flag officers use Connies as their flagships and regular command ships, why wouldn't we assume they are the top-of-the-line ships?
Check out Roddenberry's TMP novelization, page 115. He makes it clear that while the Big E is officially referred to as a "heavy cruiser", she's really a "battleship".
Check out Roddenberry's TMP novelization, page 115. He makes it clear that while the Big E is officially referred to as a "heavy cruiser", she's really a "battleship".
