Can shuttlecrafts go to warp?
- Thread starter The Rock
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I totally forgot about them going to warp in Disco, haha. Cool. In VOY I thought only the Delta Flyer could warp?
Voyager ones definitely do. In "Resolutions", it was stated that they had a top speed of warp 4.
It seems crazy that people would travel for hours in a non warp capable ship... if it takes 6 hours to get somewhere by shuttle, a starship at Warp 6 (392c) would get there in 56 seconds.
It seems crazy that people would travel for hours in a non warp capable ship... if it takes 6 hours to get somewhere by shuttle, a starship at Warp 6 (392c) would get there in 56 seconds.
I've always wondered why, in that one TNG episode where Picard and Wesley were traveling in that shuttlepod together so that Picard could get to that place to get his operation, why didn't they take a warp-capable shuttlecraft? Surely the 1701-D had at least one warp-capable shuttlecraft in their vast shuttlebay in the saucer section.
The thing about shuttles is that if you can't use warp, for whatever reason, then the shuttle is your vehicle of choice.
1) If warp is forbidden, surely the mothership has better things to do than putter along at impulse - but Picard can still sail across the no-warp zone to his hairstylist and back, while the Enterprise does those things.
2) If warp engines are forbidden, it's easier to rip out the warp engine from a shuttle than from a starship.
3) If warp is superfluous, your lower decks Ensigns can yank it out of your shuttle, so that it is now available to that other shuttle that does need warp; for your twelve shuttles, you only need to carry six warp engines.
Why would warp be forbidden? Well, many an episode or movie shows, quite graphically, that warping close to certain stars, at least at certain times, is slow as molasses. You hit warp ten, your ship barely moves against the background of the Sun (until it goes to time warp, which may actually be a phenomenon directly related to that slowing down, only taking it to ridiculous extremes!). Not all stars forbid warping or make it impractical - but around those that do (including our Sol), it may make more sense to do the impulse trip on a shuttle. Except, of course, one seldom visits Sol unless the very purpose is to bring the ship herself there, so we generally see this shuttling in other contexts, from "The Neutral Zone" to "Samaritan Snare" to all sorts of adventures all the way down to VOY.
Removing of warp cores would be an issue in "The Sound of Her Voice", where it's impractical to deprive the Defiant of her core, yet a shuttlecraft looking basically exactly like a miniature version of the mothership, including all the glowing bits, can fly down core-free. Mind you, this shuttle, with the aft hatch, is probably the one that went interstellar in (the admitted dream sequence of) "The Search" and thus probably normally does sport a warp core or at least a warp engine.
it is basically never that anybody in Trek would establish a nacelle-equipped craft as incapable of warp. The ENT shuttlepod gets actual dialog on not managing FTL, of course. But the later shuttles all go FTL on occasion, implicit or explicit - that is, shuttles of all types go, even if individual shuttles of said types are quite often seen puttering around at impulse. And yeah, the tiny TNG pods are said to have "impulse nacelles", which is fine and well and doesn't preclude warp, and one of 'em is said to lack warp in "Time Squared", which may be taken as indicating said pod was damaged.
So the original question is pretty decisively answered: we never learned of a shuttle type that would be incapable of warp by design, other than the primitive ENT shuttlepod. And most examples of a shuttle of certain type moving at impulse or being credited with impulse are countered by examples of shuttles of that very same type doing warp, the TNG shuttlepod possibly excluded.
Timo Saloniemi
1) If warp is forbidden, surely the mothership has better things to do than putter along at impulse - but Picard can still sail across the no-warp zone to his hairstylist and back, while the Enterprise does those things.
2) If warp engines are forbidden, it's easier to rip out the warp engine from a shuttle than from a starship.
3) If warp is superfluous, your lower decks Ensigns can yank it out of your shuttle, so that it is now available to that other shuttle that does need warp; for your twelve shuttles, you only need to carry six warp engines.
Why would warp be forbidden? Well, many an episode or movie shows, quite graphically, that warping close to certain stars, at least at certain times, is slow as molasses. You hit warp ten, your ship barely moves against the background of the Sun (until it goes to time warp, which may actually be a phenomenon directly related to that slowing down, only taking it to ridiculous extremes!). Not all stars forbid warping or make it impractical - but around those that do (including our Sol), it may make more sense to do the impulse trip on a shuttle. Except, of course, one seldom visits Sol unless the very purpose is to bring the ship herself there, so we generally see this shuttling in other contexts, from "The Neutral Zone" to "Samaritan Snare" to all sorts of adventures all the way down to VOY.
Removing of warp cores would be an issue in "The Sound of Her Voice", where it's impractical to deprive the Defiant of her core, yet a shuttlecraft looking basically exactly like a miniature version of the mothership, including all the glowing bits, can fly down core-free. Mind you, this shuttle, with the aft hatch, is probably the one that went interstellar in (the admitted dream sequence of) "The Search" and thus probably normally does sport a warp core or at least a warp engine.
it is basically never that anybody in Trek would establish a nacelle-equipped craft as incapable of warp. The ENT shuttlepod gets actual dialog on not managing FTL, of course. But the later shuttles all go FTL on occasion, implicit or explicit - that is, shuttles of all types go, even if individual shuttles of said types are quite often seen puttering around at impulse. And yeah, the tiny TNG pods are said to have "impulse nacelles", which is fine and well and doesn't preclude warp, and one of 'em is said to lack warp in "Time Squared", which may be taken as indicating said pod was damaged.
So the original question is pretty decisively answered: we never learned of a shuttle type that would be incapable of warp by design, other than the primitive ENT shuttlepod. And most examples of a shuttle of certain type moving at impulse or being credited with impulse are countered by examples of shuttles of that very same type doing warp, the TNG shuttlepod possibly excluded.
Timo Saloniemi
Exactly I agree with you both.
TNG shuttles were shown going to warp at times, also. But not always. I'm not entirely sure especially in the early seasons of TNG that much thought was given about it. In an episode like Samaritan Trap, the shuttle has a six hour flight after being dropped off. Outside the windows, there's no sign of the distortions of warp normally seen in that show. Assuming conveniently that shuttle was going at half the speed of light, then they might be covering around 3 billion km/h or so. They could cover the distance from the Sun to around Pluto. So they're not going from one star system to another, most likely. Dropping Wesley Crusher off for a few hours to get rid of him makes sense, but not a captain.
One solution is something that comes up a lot but never has really been dealt with well in star trek: impulse can also be an FTL drive. It was mentioned for TOS era Romulan ships. It was shown on a few others. Why one would use impulse at superluminal velocities instead of warp isn't really clear, but maybe it has some benefit, and is just another divergent technology that works but isn't always used.
Where does it say that impulse is an FTl drive?
the way I understand it, is that it is used as a classical propulsion system.
Creating thrust, powered by nuclear fusion if no warp engine is available.
What exactly 1/4, etc impulse means is unclear.
It‘s not a rate of acceleration, as we typically see ships maintain a constant velocity.
But also typically those velocities are usually relatively slow.
the way I understand it, is that it is used as a classical propulsion system.
Creating thrust, powered by nuclear fusion if no warp engine is available.
What exactly 1/4, etc impulse means is unclear.
It‘s not a rate of acceleration, as we typically see ships maintain a constant velocity.
But also typically those velocities are usually relatively slow.
VOY had a whole episode the premise of which was around a shuttle going to warp 10.
All shuttlecraft are equipped with nacelles which mirror the ship they came from, as well as impulse exhausts at the rear, so they would all be capable of limited warp speeds (most probably topping out at factor 3, due to size of their reactor cores and available fuel). Only shuttlepods are not capable of any sort of faster-than-light travel.
All shuttlecraft are equipped with nacelles which mirror the ship they came from, as well as impulse exhausts at the rear, so they would all be capable of limited warp speeds (most probably topping out at factor 3, due to size of their reactor cores and available fuel). Only shuttlepods are not capable of any sort of faster-than-light travel.
The ones featured in The Search were Type 18s. That seen in The Sound of Her Voice was a Type 10.
The former is clearly the Type 15 from TNG (including the interior set) with some extra body kit. The latter is a distinct design, with interior shots framed so tightly that you can barely see anything.
Type 18, a mixture of model work and a Type 15 interior, has two gullwing doors, one of which is shown open in "The Search II". So it can't be the craft Sisko and Bashir used for their illusory escape in "The Search II", because that one (despite using the same interior) instead (and rather clearly not in addition!) had a rear hatch, which in turn is a feature of Type 10. It's pretty convenient to think that Bashir and Sisko dreamed of utilizing the Type 10 Chaffee in that episode, then.
Type 18 was never seen at warp, or going explicitly interstellar: in "The Search", Kira and Odo would have been pretty close to their destination already when bailing out of the Defiant. But Type 18 was used in "Destiny" to protect an exotic substance inside the wormhole with its warp field, erected by what was explicitly called "its warp drive". Type 10 was never seen at warp, either, and indeed its only real appearance in "The Sound of Her Voice" involved it not having a warp core aboard - but it's a bigger thing than Type 18, a good candidate for the fantasy flight in "The Search", and adorned with the same engine bulges as the mothership.
Actually, they were never shown going to warp. That is, there were never warp streaks outside the windows, or an exterior shot of them moving at warp.
No dialogue described either of the known designs (Type 6 or Type 7) as going to warp, either. A different type was said to be at warp in "Skin of Evil" - possibly a TNG era runabout of some sort, with Type 7 cockpit interior but a completely dissimilar exterior. And of course we can infer that these shuttles sometimes moved FTL. But it never happened while we watched or listened.
We have later seen explicit VFX of Type 6 going to warp, in VOY. We have never seen Type 7 go to warp, but our only feeble reason for thinking it might not be capable of that is "Q Who?", where Riker reacts to one of those shuttles going missing by ordering a search, and this dialogue then follows:
The writer idea there obviously was that the shuttle had no warp drive, and Data had already shot down any realistic chance of finding Picard, at which point Riker would gloomily choose the unrealistic. But we need not care much for that idea, since obviously a search would start somewhere, and Data remarking on this particular milestone need not hold any deeper relevance in the ongoing search.
Not quite, it was mentioned on a Romulan ship. That Romulan ships in general would have this same limitation is a baseless leap of illogic, akin to assuming that all ships in the 1860s were as slow and unseaworthy as USS Monitor.
Furthermore, nothing said there suggested impulse would be FTL. The Romulans just had simple impulse power, and were slower than Kirk's ship as the result, the rest left open for the audience to haggle over. Certainly we saw the ships dancing around a comet without mention of them slowing down from their original speed, an impossibility if they were doing FTL.
Where?
Why one would use impulse instead of warp is a different question, one that does need not involve FTL. Certainly there is such a need, or starships would not have impulse drives.
Timo Saloniemi
Type 18 was never seen at warp, or going explicitly interstellar: in "The Search", Kira and Odo would have been pretty close to their destination already when bailing out of the Defiant. But Type 18 was used in "Destiny" to protect an exotic substance inside the wormhole with its warp field, erected by what was explicitly called "its warp drive". Type 10 was never seen at warp, either, and indeed its only real appearance in "The Sound of Her Voice" involved it not having a warp core aboard - but it's a bigger thing than Type 18, a good candidate for the fantasy flight in "The Search", and adorned with the same engine bulges as the mothership.
Actually, they were never shown going to warp. That is, there were never warp streaks outside the windows, or an exterior shot of them moving at warp.
No dialogue described either of the known designs (Type 6 or Type 7) as going to warp, either. A different type was said to be at warp in "Skin of Evil" - possibly a TNG era runabout of some sort, with Type 7 cockpit interior but a completely dissimilar exterior. And of course we can infer that these shuttles sometimes moved FTL. But it never happened while we watched or listened.
We have later seen explicit VFX of Type 6 going to warp, in VOY. We have never seen Type 7 go to warp, but our only feeble reason for thinking it might not be capable of that is "Q Who?", where Riker reacts to one of those shuttles going missing by ordering a search, and this dialogue then follows:
The writer idea there obviously was that the shuttle had no warp drive, and Data had already shot down any realistic chance of finding Picard, at which point Riker would gloomily choose the unrealistic. But we need not care much for that idea, since obviously a search would start somewhere, and Data remarking on this particular milestone need not hold any deeper relevance in the ongoing search.
Not quite, it was mentioned on a Romulan ship. That Romulan ships in general would have this same limitation is a baseless leap of illogic, akin to assuming that all ships in the 1860s were as slow and unseaworthy as USS Monitor.
Furthermore, nothing said there suggested impulse would be FTL. The Romulans just had simple impulse power, and were slower than Kirk's ship as the result, the rest left open for the audience to haggle over. Certainly we saw the ships dancing around a comet without mention of them slowing down from their original speed, an impossibility if they were doing FTL.
Where?
Why one would use impulse instead of warp is a different question, one that does need not involve FTL. Certainly there is such a need, or starships would not have impulse drives.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes they can. It would be silly for shuttles to have impulse engines made to look just like their mothership's warp nacelles.
We do have every reason to think that impulse only works if you use subspace trickery, though. And you probably need "impulse coils" for that, or somesuch.
OTOH, nacelles aren't required for warp: many a Starfleet design makes do with cowlings, and other ships can have wholly internal FTL and STL drives.
So it all depends on what the characters say and what their hardware is actually shown achieving. For all we know, there are giant ships that can't do FTL at all, and spacesuits that have warp engines in the shoulder paddings.
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, nacelles aren't required for warp: many a Starfleet design makes do with cowlings, and other ships can have wholly internal FTL and STL drives.
So it all depends on what the characters say and what their hardware is actually shown achieving. For all we know, there are giant ships that can't do FTL at all, and spacesuits that have warp engines in the shoulder paddings.
Timo Saloniemi
There's a strange notion that TOS shuttlecraft weren't warp-capable, which I think was claimed in some supplemental text, but is clearly nonsense when you look at all the episodes showing shuttlecraft making interstellar journeys. "The Galileo Seven" showed a shuttle being lost somewhere among "four complete solar systems," so clearly it and the search shuttles had interstellar range. "The Menagerie" showed Kirk and Mendez pursuing the Enterprise in a shuttle while the E was explicitly at warp. Other shuttles made interstellar journeys in "Metamorphosis," "...Last Battlefield," "The Slaver Weapon," and probably others.
I've never bought that interpretation. Strictly speaking, Scott said "Their power is simple impulse," not their propulsion. It may have been some other use of the word "impulse." Alternatively, maybe he meant that at sublight, they'd rely only on a "simple" kind of impulse rather than the more complex Starfleet impulse drives with their mass-reduction fields to improve acceleration (see the TNG Tech Manual), so they'd be less maneuverable in a fight. Presumably any combat between ships would be at sublight (though later series showed combat at warp, as little sense as that makes), so Scotty focused only on that scenario.
Any depiction of ships making interstellar journeys on impulse drive, I take as a mistake in the fiction rather than an absolute fact. A work of narrative fiction is not a documentary; we're not required to take every last part of it as literal fact. It's just a story we're being told, and we're allowed to say that part of a story doesn't make sense and just ignore it. Roddenberry himself sometimes suggested to fans that ST was just a dramatization of the Enterprise's "real" adventures and that inconsistencies could be explained as errors in the telling.
I've never bought that interpretation. Strictly speaking, Scott said "Their power is simple impulse," not their propulsion. It may have been some other use of the word "impulse." Alternatively, maybe he meant that at sublight, they'd rely only on a "simple" kind of impulse rather than the more complex Starfleet impulse drives with their mass-reduction fields to improve acceleration (see the TNG Tech Manual), so they'd be less maneuverable in a fight. Presumably any combat between ships would be at sublight (though later series showed combat at warp, as little sense as that makes), so Scotty focused only on that scenario.
Any depiction of ships making interstellar journeys on impulse drive, I take as a mistake in the fiction rather than an absolute fact. A work of narrative fiction is not a documentary; we're not required to take every last part of it as literal fact. It's just a story we're being told, and we're allowed to say that part of a story doesn't make sense and just ignore it. Roddenberry himself sometimes suggested to fans that ST was just a dramatization of the Enterprise's "real" adventures and that inconsistencies could be explained as errors in the telling.
The "Metamorphosis" journey is hardly established as interstellar: the whole point there is to meet with Scotty on the Enterprise, so a trip out of one Canaris system's inner shallows to the mothership, then a ride aboard her to another, and then possibly yet another traverse of shallows to that system's relevant planet, is more than suggested.
However, that the shuttle there would be at warp is well established: the Companion is observed at explicit warp and then said to be "staying right with us" which would be an odd observation indeed to make were the shuttle itself not at warp.
"Let That Be, Let That Beeee...." in turn features a trip that could well be at sublight, since the occupant is in no known hurry.
But of course assuming warp is much better, especially as those the shuttle was stolen from would be likely to give chase otherwise.In "The Slaver Weapon", the evidence is less than compelling in another fashion. The craft there is massively larger than the TOS shuttles, and her having capacity X thus is not a strong argument for shuttles in general having X. The Copernicus having a table to go with the chairs is a capacity the TOS shuttle lacks, say...
Timo Saloniemi
There is a distinction that shuttles are never actually seen AT warp, or entering/exiting warp, before a certain point in franchise history. In TOS, there was no real visual distinction between FTL and STL speeds other than what was told in dialogue. The streaky stars started showing up in TMP, but even then, a ship at warp would still be seen with a more-or-less regular starfield around it (Vger itself was obviously moving at FTL speeds between encounters, but may have been moving at warp at most points except when it stopped to take out Epsilon-9).
By TNG, the familiar streaking stars became the visual marker. Shuttles aren't ever shown at warp through the whole run of the series, but it's generally implied that all the bigger ones are warp-capable by virtue of the mission they're on. It's only really in VOY that we see the standard shuttles at warp, but they're almost always seen exiting warp when the action begins. In both series, this is generally because the show producers are saving on their VFX budget by using a curtain with holes in it as a backdrop. This was a noted problem with DS9's runabouts, where the side windows were an annoyance they eventually rectified by covering over the windows with shutters. Until ENT, TNG-era shuttles had these big wraparound windows up front that I'm sure were difficult to shoot action around without incurring a VFX shot. The Delta Flyer was particularly designed to limit this forward view, and as such was more frequently seen at warp.
Mark
By TNG, the familiar streaking stars became the visual marker. Shuttles aren't ever shown at warp through the whole run of the series, but it's generally implied that all the bigger ones are warp-capable by virtue of the mission they're on. It's only really in VOY that we see the standard shuttles at warp, but they're almost always seen exiting warp when the action begins. In both series, this is generally because the show producers are saving on their VFX budget by using a curtain with holes in it as a backdrop. This was a noted problem with DS9's runabouts, where the side windows were an annoyance they eventually rectified by covering over the windows with shutters. Until ENT, TNG-era shuttles had these big wraparound windows up front that I'm sure were difficult to shoot action around without incurring a VFX shot. The Delta Flyer was particularly designed to limit this forward view, and as such was more frequently seen at warp.
Mark
In my mind, any shuttle with 2 drives shown are ftl capable. So anything short of shuttle pods that are shown without warp nacelles are warp capable.
For there use, going into system and out takes what? 3 hours? So taking the slow bus in and out of a gravity well makes sense.
For there use, going into system and out takes what? 3 hours? So taking the slow bus in and out of a gravity well makes sense.
Here I would beg to differ, for the sake of accuracy. It is in TNG where we never see shuttles (from outside, or from an inside view that would reveal windows) when they are clearly stated to be at warp speed, probably exactly because TPTB thought the audiences would mind. In the early seasons, there are unclear cases where a static starfield is seen, but those are unclear cases, an impulse journey or at least an impulse moment being a distinct possibility.
However, TPTB in TOS had no such concerns, and thus we rather frequently do see a shuttle in flight against the standard, ambiguous starscape even in situations where warp is either specified in dialogue ("Metamorphosis") or implied by circumstance ("Menagerie").
How's the distinction relevant? Chiefly in terms of the argument of whether the stars should streak or not in general. And with TOS, TAS, TMP, TWoK and TOS-R all, we have to accept that streaking isn't mandatory. (And perhaps that it's an issue of camera placement: within warp field, outside warp field, inside the very shell of the field...)
Timo Saloniemi
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