Shuttlecraft Questions

[Timo]

A starship could well have an entourage that doesn't actually travel inside said ship. Think Jacques-Yves Cousteau: his expeditions often featured vehicles and vessels essential for the success of the mission but virtually never actually packed aboard the Calypso. These assorted hovercraft, amphibious trucks, riverboats or motorcycles still carried the Calypso symbol.

It should probably count for something that the mission of the Copernicus isn't directly associated with the Enterprise in the dialogue. The voyage is from unknown location X providing them with "a Slaver stasis box discovered by archaeologists on the planet Kzin", to Starbase 25.

None of this changes the dialogue-explicit fact that the Copernicus is an Enterprise shuttlecraft. She might just be normally berthed at the other end of the sortie, at a starbase, rather than aboard the starship whose hangar cannot really handle craft of that size except as temporary visitors. Most deep space vessels might have such a liaison craft assigned, at several key starbases - or then new pennants are simply painted on one and the same craft for each mission...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marsden]

I'm sorry, who even said shuttles are not warp capable in the first place?

I think its been suggested that the TOS shuttle is a bit small to contain a Warp engine.

Thank you.

This is probably a bad analogy, but I was thinking of it as a the difference between a truck and a motorcycle. The motorcycle can go but it's tiny engine would never be able to move the truck.

 

[Warped9]

The bit in "The Menagerie" referencing the shuttlecraft being ion powered and the music used during the shuttlecraft fly-by could give someone the idea of it not having warp capability. But everything else throughout the series argues that they have to be warp capable. Whether intentionally or not the TOS writers were smart in not getting tied up in the issue.

The mention of the shuttlecraft not being able to catch the Enterprise in "The Menagerie" doesn't mean the shuttlecraft can't be warp capable. If the Enterprise is doing Warp 4 and the shuttlecraft manages Warp 3.5 then obviously the shuttlecraft will never catch up with the Enterprise. The difference could be even smaller (say Warp 4 and Warp 3.9) and the shuttlecraft will still never catch up.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, it's in early TNG where something is said about a shuttlecraft not being warp capable. And I just ignore that as poor research or recall on the writer's part.


Shuttlecraft can have quite practical uses particularly with warp capability. They're ideal if use of the transporter isn't possible or is ill-advised (as seen in "The Galileo Seven"). They can allow the starship's personnel to be split up to different locations for different missions needing to be done simultaneously (as seen in "Metamorphosis" and "Slaver Weapon"). Although not depicted in TOS they could be used to survey a star system more extensively by being dispatched to cover more territory simultaneously than relying solely on the starship, effectively extending the reach of the starship's capabilities.

And I'm sure there are uses I'm overlooking.

 

[Commishsleer]

In Galileo 7 they talk about the 'main reactor' but they also talk about fuel, never dilithium crystals. Do they need dilithium crystals for all Warp Drives?

Also the Enterprise left at Space Normal Speed, which is what? Pretty darn fast in Blakes 7 but 'slow' in Star Trek? Is it sublight? But I still can't see the Galileo travelling sublight to get to the planet in the first place unless all the planetary systems in the area were within light hours of each other. Is that possible?

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Meanwhile the documentation on the SPACE: 1999 Eagle shows that its fusion rockets are good for 0.25 c. Starfleet must be able to do better than that. Heck, the photon torpedoes can do better than that!

I wonder if there's a problem with this spec. Unless the Eagle has an inertial damping field, you'd have to spend considerable time accelerating to .25 c (75000 kilometers per second), and then just as much time slowing down, to keep from being crushed. So that kind of speed wouldn't pay unless you were going a very long distance.

 

[Warped9]

A light hour is how far light travels in an hour. So for a craft to cover that same distance at the same rate or better than it obviously has to be FTL capable.

To get a real handle on this you have to do a few real calculations. Only then can you really appreciate how vast space is and how distant things are from each other.

I suspect few people outside of those in space sciences really understood this in the '60s. I even wonder if that many more people really grasp this today.


Also "fuel" doesn't necessarily have to be conventional like liquid or solid fuel. The fact that Scotty was draining the hand phasers for fuel argues that the fuel was actually energy rather than something liquid or solid. I think confusion resulted from certain terms being used that were incompatible with what was being shown. Scotty references a "fuel line" and "jettisoning fuel and igniting it." This sounds like a conventional rocket arrangement which audiences of the day would understand, but everything else argues against that very thing.

I just chalk all this up to the whole thing not really being thought through and gloss over it. In fairness to them they didn't think it would ever be scrutinized in such detail for decades on end.

If anyone messed it up it was the writers on TNG who don't look to have done their homework.

 

[J.T.B.]

Shuttlecraft can have quite practical uses particularly with warp capability. They're ideal if use of the transporter isn't possible or is ill-advised (as seen in "The Galileo Seven"). They can allow the starship's personnel to be split up to different locations for different missions needing to be done simultaneously (as seen in "Metamorphosis" and "Slaver Weapon"). Although not depicted in TOS they could be used to survey a star system more extensively by being dispatched to cover more territory simultaneously than relying solely on the starship, effectively extending the reach of the starship's capabilities.

Yes, that's an important point and is how I've thought of the shuttlecraft, too. If you look back to the peacetime Royal Navy in the 1800s -- which is always a good comparison for Starfleet -- there were a lot of times when their patrol/policing cruisers were stretched thin over their vast territories. Of necessity, ships' boats were often sent on long detached missions, usually 10-20 sailors or so under a midshipman. The anti-slavery patrol was particularly notable in that regard, with cruisers often having multiple boats on weeks-long detached (and very dangerous) patrols spread over thousands of miles of coast.

Warp shuttles -- and I don't think there's a question that they are warp-capable -- would allow a starship to send a medical team to this outpost, a security team to that colony and so on, to handle small missions in a reasonable time but without tying up the whole vessel.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Sort of freaky that ST characters in 1999 seem so (visually) natrual!

 

[Timo]

I think confusion resulted from certain terms being used that were incompatible with what was being shown. Scotty references a "fuel line" and "jettisoning fuel and igniting it." This sounds like a conventional rocket arrangement which audiences of the day would understand, but everything else argues against that very thing.

Well, audiences of the past would have been unfamiliar with the idea of using a fluid for fuel in a raygun. But that's actually a pretty good idea, and more familiar to today's audiences with at least some exposure to fluid-fueled cell phones and the like; if you are going to use "chemical batteries", combustion is a pretty good way to get energy out of them, and not just in rocketry.

Not that there'd be any evidence for phaser sidearms having fluid for fuel, of course. But we never got a good look at the way the power cells are reloaded or drained, beyond this episode...

Personally, I prefer to think of "The Galileo Seven" as the heroes using the term "fuel" generically for any energy source, just like it's used today already (say, "nuclear fuel" even though the last thing you want to do with uranium is to burn it!). You need generic fuel to energize your propulsion system and get out of the planet, but you can only burn one variety of fuel - and with the burst pipe, you are only gonna have fumes (or puddles) of the original fluid left, not enough for liftoff propulsion but enough for use as a flare.

Warp shuttles -- and I don't think there's a question that they are warp-capable -- would allow a starship to send a medical team to this outpost, a security team to that colony and so on, to handle small missions in a reasonable time but without tying up the whole vessel.

I'd still like to speculate that, just like a sailing ship would have a variety of boats for a variety of tasks, a starship would feature a balance between commonalizing and standardizing on one hand, and optimizing on the other. Storing something like the Copernicus aboard would be cumbersome, and never mind an aquashuttle, but there would be missions featuring a mix and missions featuring a bland collection of identical jacks-of-all-trades with necessarily low performance.

Such an arrangement, complex 1800s one week, austere 2000s another, would explain the need for those vast hangars in the first place. (But I think the mix from "Mudd's Passion" would still best be explained as a period of transition, with the shuttle used in the ep replacing the TOS shuttle, and Carter Winston's confiscated craft adding to the mix; at any other time, we'd only see one type of generic shuttle rather than two, and perhaps one or two special craft.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Well one reasoning for warp driven shuttlecraft would be just reasonable in-system travel times between worlds. It takes light around 8 minutes to get from the Sun to Earth. This is one AU. It is about 38 AU out to the likes of Pluto and many more to the edge of the Oort cloud and the edge of the solar system. At 0.25 c (full impulse), it would take over 20 hours to reach Pluto from Earth, and several days to reach the each of the system. At slower impulse speeds, since they don't seem to travel at full impulse all the time, it would take even longer to cross a star system. Roughly half an hour to an two hours to get from one planet to the next in the inner solar system, and many hours between Outer System planets.

But, at Warp 3? You can make it from Neptune to Mars in ten minutes, depending on the relative positions to each other around the Sun.

 

[Commishsleer]

Slightly off-topic here.

How about the lifepods they had aboard the Kelvin and the nuEnterprise?
Surely they needed to be FTL to be of practical use. Unless they were ejected from their crafts at Warp speed (presumably sent to the nearest habitable planet) and retained their velocity (OK I'm not up on the science here).

 

[Ithekro]

They might have something like the photon torpedoes have in the likes of a warp sustainer to keep the warp field going, but not adding additional propulsion to it.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

Meanwhile the documentation on the SPACE: 1999 Eagle shows that its fusion rockets are good for 0.25 c. Starfleet must be able to do better than that. Heck, the photon torpedoes can do better than that!

I wonder if there's a problem with this spec. Unless the Eagle has an inertial damping field, you'd have to spend considerable time accelerating to .25 c (75000 kilometers per second), and then just as much time slowing down, to keep from being crushed. So that kind of speed wouldn't pay unless you were going a very long distance.

Another problem with that is that at 1/4 the speed of light, it would take, what, eight seconds to reach the moon? Even if you factor in acceleration/deceleration, that cup of coffee in the very first episode that gets served to Koenig on his eagle flight to the moon must've been pretty tepid for him to be able to drink it so fast!

I guess writers must know better than to tie themselves down, for even on Space:1999 there was no reference to the eagles' speed...

But one thing the eagle and shuttlecraft share is a vaguely defined, little-seen aft compartment.

I always did wonder what could possibly have bee in those boxes that McCoy and Mears 'found' in the aft compartment in The Galileo Seven...

 

[Ithekro]

Ones does not need to go at full throttle at all times.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I guess writers must know better than to tie themselves down, for even on Space:1999 there was no reference to the eagles' speed...

Keep in mind that the moon was booking through the solar systems it encountered generally in a matter of days. The Eagles had to decelerate and re-accelerate within that time frame. The Eagles were established to carry anti-gravity screens [link].

 

[Ithekro]

Given the time it took the moon to each other worlds, one suspects it was going at faster than light speeds, otherwise it take years to get to even the next star system. Wormholes and the like.

I seem to recall they once were able to contact a future Earth (due to time dilation) that had had to deal with there not been a moon to keep the tides and things going.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Given the time it took the moon to each other worlds, one suspects it was going at faster than light speeds, otherwise it take years to get to even the next star system. Wormholes and the like.

I seem to recall they once were able to contact a future Earth (due to time dilation) that had had to deal with there not been a moon to keep the tides and things going.

There were at least two episodes that suggested relativistic time dilation as the mechanism for how they got to so many solar systems. They also went through one or more space warps, fell into a black sun, etc. So, it was a combination. But always, hands were waving.

 

[Search4]

Well it is canon that a small primitive ship - the Phoenix - can travel at warp. And there's no sign of antimatter, dilithium, or any of the 23rd century technology we know.

Whatever their power source is - it can get to speed above lightspeed for a few moments, at least.

200 years later, i would argue a shuttlecraft could readily travel at lower warp for various missions. Why not? There's no material difference in size than Phoenix, in fact it is larger. Some craft may not have warp capability (for example, landing on a planet where you might not want to use that tech) but if Cochrane can do it in that volume and with his capabilities, certainly Starfleet can do it in the bus-sized Galileo.

 

[Melakon]

I always did wonder what could possibly have been in those boxes that McCoy and Mears 'found' in the aft compartment in The Galileo Seven...

First aid kits, thermal blankets, rations, sex toys.

 

[publiusr]

Sort of freaky that ST characters in 1999 seem so (visually) natrual!

That's probably what Planet of the Titans would have looked like. A lot of beige. That's them in the winged shuttle looking at the surface installation what with all the tubes