Curiously, though, when our heroes do use shuttles in-system, they always operate at sublight. In DS9, it always takes hours to get from DS9 to Bajor by runabout - 2 to 6 hours to be exact (apparently, 2 is when the station and the planet are at their closest and 6 is when they are at the opposite sides of the star, which incidentally also means that it takes two hours to cover the distance of one AU, that is, one radius of Bajor's orbit). From "By Inferno's Light", we learn that warp can cover the distance in mere seconds, but apparently no crisis is big enough for the runabouts to risk such a thing.
Yet starships can and will warp inside star systems with impunity. Except at Bajor and Earth, sometimes. Which makes me think it's all down to "subspace weather", and the Bajoran system is an especially stormy one (remember "Invasive Procedures" and "Things Past"!) while Earth is moderately stormy. And every time our heroes use shuttles in an alien system for journeys the starships themselves could handle, it's because there's a storm going on and it makes better sense to send a sublight shuttle than a sublight starship to the long and tedious trip through the storm. Hey, if the storm blows over, the shuttle can return at warp! Except it never does...
AFAIK, we have never really heard of a "lifepod" propelling anybody to safety across meaningful distances. When Picard left the Stargazer, his crew drifted in "shuttles"; when Robau's crew evacuated, they did so in what looked like shuttles. When nuKirk was ejected in a pod, he didn't make a trip to safety, he fell on a planet at point blank range; the same happened to the two Arcos survivors in "Legacy", and supposedly also to the Odin survivors in "Angel One" .When pods were mentioned elsewhere in Trek, they were found adrift in the middle of nowhere; this is apparently the designed and designated role of lifepods, to keep the occupants alive until somebody else comes and rescues them.
When Sisko ejected in "Emissary", we do not know what happened to his ride, nor whether it was a shuttle or an escape pod, although visually it lacked nacelles. All we know is that both the Borg and the E-D failed to locate that craft after ejection. But that could be due to stealth rather than due to propulsion; sensible survivors would simply be vewy vewy quiet and not move at all, and hope that the bogeyman went away.
We could argue that the testbed could only do a few seconds of warp. Early experiments with rocket propulsion were like that, and had no practical applications in aeronautics and no hope of taking anybody to the Moon or beyond. So it might require a truly massive leap in technology from the Phoenix to the decidedly warp-capable TNG shuttles - a leap so great that the in-between TOS shuttles might not qualify quite yet.
Then again, the TAS shuttles were not significantly larger than the TOS one, and they did perform explicit interstellar trips. We could again argue that the TOS design falls short of some important threshold, by a few meters or a few tons or a few millicochranes or whatnot. But then again, we could admit that there's no proof for such.
Timo Saloniemi
