Can shuttlecrafts go to warp?

[FcukTWOK]

Or the pod without the sled?

There are two curved glowing slits on each side of the pod's docking collar which very likely indicate some form of impulse-ish drive system for shuttle missions that do not require additional propulsion modules. Incidentally, those two features are dark while the pod is attached to the sled as the latter is clearly equipped with its own impulse engines aft of each warp nacelle.

 

[Timo]

OTOH, the sled, too, has a glowing aft fixture - the square thing just below the pod, and off to starboard. That's the color of the shuttle glow, too, FWIW. Probably not an engine there. But possibly an engine in the pod. That is, unless it's just a pair of lamps for illuminating final approach to a docking port. Or a pair of glowing sensors for achieving the same.

The general issue would seem to be that the pod doesn't look capable of independent ops much. The docking port is supposed to work so that it absolutely requires a mothership for the opening of the doors, say. We can postulate a side door, much as in the smaller version of the pod Probert sketched for use as an Enterprise auxiliary, but what the shooting model actually has there is just a pair of side windows...

Top-mounting would rule out it using those docking ports under the saucer, inside those hatches.

But nothing can dock there anyway, not without a veritable trunk as the docking adapter.

Nacelle placement above or below wouldn't affect docking with the side doors, which in any case make the most sense because the engineers would want vertical walls for vertical doors so that they could have horizontal floors... But the real damning fault of the design for the purposes of docking with the sled attached is that there's this stern overhang, this protruding of the nacelles several meters farther back than the rear docking tube.

The sled looks fast, very fast. Vulcan to Earth in about a half day, or somewhere around 1 ly/hr.

We can always argue V'Ger was approaching from the direction of Vulcan (and today, we want to, because we "know" 40 Eridani sits nicely between Earth and Klingon territory), so it would be Kirk's ship doing the traveling, not Spock's sled.

We can't tell where Spock was hoping to go in that courier. Was he already on his way to Earth even though Kirk's hastening of the launch meant Spock would be way late? Or did he only launch after learning that Kirk had launched, and was setting up a rendezvous somewhere en route? Did Spock have prescient powers here, for his usual Vulcan reasons or thanks to V'Ger somehow?

How did the wormhole figure in that? Did it give Kirk a boost, or stop him in his tracks, or fling him sideways? For all we know, the Enterprise was basically gliding past Vulcan when Spock boarded.

...Or had already passed Vulcan and thus would catch up with Spock who was independently hurrying towards V'Ger, aboard a contraption he had put together out of an expendable travel pod and a stolen pair of warp engines intended for cargo hauling or whatnot, so that nobody but him would need lose his or her life in the adventure? Chekov does have difficulty identifying the very configuration of the approaching vessel, even if Uhura can tell it has a Federation shuttle transponder onboard. (Sure, both parts also have the same Vulcan lettering, supposedly saying "Surak" in Vulcaneseian - something Spock would be unlikely to paint on the side of a makeshift kamikaze vessel!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FcukTWOK]

OTOH, the sled, too, has a glowing aft fixture - the square thing just below the pod, and off to starboard. That's the color of the shuttle glow, too, FWIW. Probably not an engine there. But possibly an engine in the pod. That is, unless it's just a pair of lamps for illuminating final approach to a docking port. Or a pair of glowing sensors for achieving the same.

Watch the sequence: Those panels function as strobes (the Enterprise also has a corresponding set), presumably to aid in visual navigation/collision avoidance in the event the automated docking system fails.

 

[Christopher]

The sled looks fast, very fast.

What does that even mean when talking about an FTL spacecraft? You could streamline the heck out of its shape and it would have zero influence on its actual ability to create a gravitational metric that alters the local spacetime topology to achieve an effectively superluminal change in its position relative to the surrounding universe. It could be shaped like a brick and be exactly as effective at warping space.

 

[Henoch]

You missed my next sentence which was real explanation for my fast comment (but the sled does "look" fast now that you mention it), i.e. Spock gets from Vulcan to Earth (16 lightyears) very fast, i.e. less than a day which puts the sled in the 6000+ times the speed of light range. That's fast, very fast.

 

[Christopher]

Spock gets from Vulcan to Earth (16 lightyears) very fast, i.e. less than a day which puts the sled in the 6000+ times the speed of light range. That's fast, very fast.

Speed of plot. These things have never been consistent. "That Which Survives" claimed the Enterprise went nearly 1000 light years in just 12 hours, which is 730,000 times the speed of light, which is insane. Voyager could've gotten home in a month at that speed. You can't take any of the time or speed references in Trek literally or expect them to depict a consistent technology.

Also, we don't know that rendezvous happened near Earth. The Enterprise had fallen through a wormhole -- there's no telling where they came out.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

It could be shaped like a brick and be exactly as effective at warping space.

The Borg Cubes proves your point by being faster than just about every StarFleet ship out there.

 

[FcukTWOK]

The docking port is supposed to work so that it absolutely requires a mothership for the opening of the doors, say. We can postulate a side door, much as in the smaller version of the pod Probert sketched for use as an Enterprise auxiliary, but what the shooting model actually has there is just a pair of side windows...

BTW, there are details aft of the miniature's vertical windows that appears to be doors (the port side door/electrical access panel is even open in one of the photos on Memory Alpha).

 

[Timo]

It would be fun for the forward irregular quadrilateral to be a hinged or sliding door, yes. At least it would be conveniently at the standing-height part of the craft and all.

...Of course, LDS "Veritas" now shows a door on the canonically little-seen starboard side of the shuttle, in place of the pair of vertical windows there. No doubt a 24th century modification, but still.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

Shuttles are indeed Warp-capable... but up until the Runabouts and Delta Flyer were made, I'd say they were relatively slow.
Type 4 was mentioned that it was capable of Warp 4.
Runabouts were faster than that, but the Delta Flyer was essentially the fastest.

 

[Timo]

To nitpick:

The one and only shuttle for which a top speed was quoted, the unseen one from VOY "Resolutions", indeed could do Warp 4 - but they called it "Type 9" there. This type number has never been spoken elsewhere or associated onscreen with any particular design. Some sources like to claim that the standard VOY "speedboat" shuttle was Type 9, but its creator wanted to call it Type 12, and it never got a type number in any episode, not even in an obscure Okudagram.

OTOH, the good old TNG Tech Manual described an otherwise unseen Type 9, which was a large cargo shuttle, about runabout size; it would make good sense for Tuvok to leave one of those for Janeway and Chakotay in "Resolutions", if the idea was for them to use it for doing a Captain Blight and sail all the way home, rather than force them to squeeze into one of the smaller shuttles which got bad press in "Drone" for their lack of (crew) endurance.

The Memory Alpha suggestion that Class 2 and Type 9 would be the same thing is baseless: there is no Type 9 in the shows, and Class 2 appears to cover several types rather than refer to any specific type carried by the Voyager. Nor is there any basis in claiming that the "speedboat" shuttle could do Warp 4, since it's never shown doing that speed, or any other warp speed that would have been defined on screen; the only connection to Warp 4 is the noncanon connection between the "speedboat" and the Type 9 designation. (Also, it's not really called "speedboat" anywhere except backstage, and it's never indicated to be particularly fast as shuttles go.)

Runabout top speed is not known, but the creator-intended warp 4.7 is a good match to the episode "Dax" where ships capable of Warp 5 are supposed to be good getaway vehicles for the villains.

Delta Flyer top speed is never given, surprisingly enough... If we get travel time estimates (such as in "Tsunkatse", where Janeway is clearly flooring it), we don't get distance estimates, and vice versa. We can trust Paris' pride would never have allowed him to build anything slower than the unseen Type 9, but that's as far as we get there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

The TMP sled nacelles were warp impulse hybrids right?

 

[Timo]

Hard to tell. They glowed at one end, but warp engines tend to glow, in assorted colors. Impulse engines, OTOH, need not.

In theory, the sled could be all-warp, while the top pod took care of sublight (be it impulse or mere thrusters, although the sled also has some apparent thruster ports). Perhaps the warp core is in the sled, and is parked elsewhere during dockings for safety reasons. Or then just the warp coils are in the sled, but are left behind because the length and possible mass of the nacelles complicates dockings and landings.

In practice, I'm sure Probert and Taylor intended for the sled to also have impulse - but apparently their chief rationale for having the separation capability was the need to dock with the bridge at the tight spot, contrasting against the insistence that the shuttle have prominent warp engines to convey speed and range.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[valkyrie013]

Well the rear "Lights" turned off with a sound turned off too, so to me it was the impulse on the sled turning off. As for the warp core, maybe battery powered? Or some type of reactor in the nacelles themselves?

 

[TommyR01D]

The Memory Alpha suggestion that Class 2 and Type 9 would be the same thing is baseless: there is no Type 9 in the shows, and Class 2 appears to cover several types rather than refer to any specific type carried by the Voyager.

That may be what the encyclopedia says, but it is not borne out on screen. "Class 2" is used repeatedly in VOY's later seasons to refer to the speedboat shuttle and never to any other. The USS Voyager's standard complement of shuttles includes Type 8s, Type 6s (obviously the former is a redress of the latter, and sometimes the same shuttle appears to change types between scenes) and Class 2s/Type 9s. We never see any Type 7s, Type 10s, Type 15s, Type 18s or runabouts.

The terminology used in VOY is rather annoying from a fan perspective, because the writers appear to have thrown out all memory of earlier shuttle designs and their nomenclature in favour of an entirely different invented history. Perhaps the easiest solution is to dub over any spoken reference to "Class 2" with "Type 9". How we would deal with the unseen "Class 1" is not so easy, my best suggestion being "Type 5" as that one hasn't already been used, so could be imagined that this was an earlier speedboat-esque design. Of course, this still doesn't explain the logic behind the type numbers, which do not appear to correlate either with size or with chronology.

 

[Timo]

That may be what the encyclopedia says, but it is not borne out on screen. "Class 2" is used repeatedly in VOY's later seasons to refer to the speedboat shuttle and never to any other.

That presumes that our heroes back in their Academy days were operating shuttles of this exact type, also referred to as Class 2.

More fundamentally, we see a large number of shuttle designs, most of which are identified by Type at one point. Why use a redundant Class designation for them? Especially with an absurdly low number like 2 when even 18 distinct designs is probably way too low an estimate for the fictional reality?

The answer for that may be "because writers are stupid". But it need not be - there's an obvious in-universe alternative as well.

It makes far more sense to assume that a Class covers several Types, which is also semantically intuitive. Phasers work the other way: a Type seems to cover dozens of designs across centuries, and is a measure of their capabilities (absolute or relative) rather than a specific identifier. But shuttles are allowed to be semantically reasonable where phasers are not, and indeed Class 2 ("Drone") is defined by general properties rather than by design, whereas Class 1 ("Fury") requires the extra definer "old" in order to properly point to a specific model or, supposedly, Type.

The terminology used in VOY is rather annoying from a fan perspective, because the writers appear to have thrown out all memory of earlier shuttle designs and their nomenclature in favour of an entirely different invented history.

Or then it's just analogous to how in DS9 they gave up warp factors and went for generic "maximum warp", and at one stage even gave up on stardates even if it meant having logs start with "Captain's Log, Supplemental". No new model introduced, merely the old one retired for convenience.

Of course, this still doesn't explain the logic behind the type numbers, which do not appear to correlate either with size or with chronology.

And why would they need to? Type in English is just that, a specific type of something. All the shuttle Types seen can be types of Class 2 shuttles for all we know. And perhaps all the shuttlepod Types are types of the lesser catchall Class 4.

The only real problem there is the inevitability of Starfleet having operated something like 47 distinct types of shuttle when we first see Type 7. But then again, we never get a timeline for the introduction of Type 1: perhaps this one was the 40th distinct design used by UFP Starfleet, and was introduced in the 2350s along with a new, simplified nomenclature. Or then it was introduced in the 2330s and renamed from SL(D)-4711 to Type 1 in the 2250s?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tenacity]

I'd say they were relatively slow

The shuttle that Kirk used to pursue the Enterprise in The Menagerie was keeping pace, but unable to over take.

 

[Timo]

Which was by design, though: Spock was under orders to get caught, or else the Talosians would not have allowed that to happen at all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TommyR01D]

I am reminded of Red Dwarf here.

Starbug is explicitly said to use ordinary hydrogen thrusters and not any kind of warp drive, with Lister even complaining about how slow it is. Despite this, there are multiple episodes in which the craft is shown zipping between star systems in a way that would be impossible at sublight speeds (unless the entire crew spends years in stasis each time, which seems unlikely).

 

[Redshirt214]

For what it's worth, I was reading the TNG writer guide, and it suggests that shuttlecraft are meant to be sublight only, presumably so as to not undermine the Enterprise's FTL abilities in stories and make the two ship types have distinct strengths and weaknesses (Enterprise can't land on a planet, but can go fast, Shuttles are slow but smaller and can land & ect). Presumably because it's in the writers guide, that's why warp shuttles aren't meant to be a thing in

Here's a thought... does it make sense for very small starships to have shuttles or shuttle pods, vs workpods? Seems to me a ship like Defiant or Oberth, or Centaur would not need a shuttle often, and there bays are so small that they'd likely only have a shuttlepod anyways. Other small ships, like the Raven, or Nova, can just land to arguably a work bee is more useful to them (should they need to do some welding on the hull, or load cargo, or something). Now that I think of it, Voyager should have been making more worker bees! With no Starfleet around to patch them up on a weekly basis, they'd need those more than shuttles. Maybe they should have made poor Harry the coxswain or something, and made him clean up the shuttlebay!