I should put this in the head canon topic. In TOS "The Enemy Within" shuttles weren't used to rescue the landing party because of windshear in the upper atmosphere. Winds were too strong in the area and a shuttle could not safely be used.
This is one of the many possibilities. Since the very point of the episode was that the main character became too wussy to pursue prudent courses of action, we can't tell which reasonable orders he failed to issue, and which logical options were in fact unavailable to him even if he did have the wits to try them out. But it's nicer to think that not even a competent officer (say, Spock) could have made use of the shuttles.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absences.
Statistically speaking, it always is.
Lack of star streaks does not in any way disprove that shuttles have never traveled at warp in the TNG and beyond era.
Of course it does. Warp does not happen without starstreaks in those eras.
We could just as well argue that lack of phaser beams and Klingon ships in no way disproves that the E-D is constantly fighting off a swarm of Klingon ships with phaser beams in every exterior scene of every episode...
Official word seems to be that shuttles for the most part lack warp drive.
Well, no. Only one shuttle in the history of Star Trek has ever been
said to be incapable of warp - the Type 15 pod in "Time Squared". And implicitly, the primitive shuttlepods of ENT lacked warp drive. But official word is mum on all other shuttle models, and many if not most have been shown traveling at warp. Audience reasoning is not required for establishing the warp abilities of these types.
The simple fact of how shuttles are used should be enough to support they have warp.
Quite to the contrary, the way they are used as glorified orbit-to-surface elevators suggests they shouldn't even have impulse drive...
Were they ever shown traveling across long distances, things would be different. But they extremely seldom do. And most of the time they
even then travel at explicit sublight.
It would take days to travel from the edge of a star system to any habitable planet in that star system.
Why? The Sol system is just six or so light hours in radius when Pluto is at its farthest (or, if we don't count Pluto as the edge any more, just two and a half light hours). This would be well in keeping with the impulse trip Picard and Wes Crusher took in "Samaritan Snare", say.
It would be far easier and faster and safer for a starship to warp into the location the away team or landing party of shuttle crew needs to go.
So why take a shuttle?
That is the interesting question. If shuttles have warp drive, starships have it even better. Why waste time using an inferior warp drive? OTOH, if wasting time is
not an issue, why bother with warp drive when impulse adds mere hours to an away mission that is likely to take days anyway?
Menagerie. This appears to be the shuttle's first appearance. Dialog indicates the Enterprise warped out of orbit and that Kirk and Mendez followed in the shuttle. Since the Enterprise warped out of orbit and not simply left orbit, dialog indicates the Enterprise was traveling at warp. Time was of the essence and Talos IV was 6 days away at maximum warp. An impulse only shuttle would have never caught up to the Enterprise's sensor range.
An odd claim to make about the
Enterprise sensor range. Do you really suggest the ship lost sight of Starbase 11 at that point of the mission already?
(Also, the point of Kirk was not to catch the ship - a shuttle could do no catching, as it had no lasso to catch the ship with. The point was to make chase and hope that Spock would stop, and he did. What sort of drive would be needed for making that chase is probably the wrong question: all Kirk needed was a drive that would get him and Mendez into deep trouble and thus prompt Spock to show pity. But warp need not be better than impulse, because warp 2 would still leave Kirk just as high and dry as 1/4 impulse, against a starship that can easily do warp 6.)
An impulse only shuttle would never have been in any danger of being lost.
How so? Once out of fuel, it would be incapable of return. And since it's what Kirk and the fake Mendez chose as their transport, there supposedly was nothing better available at SB 11, meaning no help available save for perhaps another suicide sortie by another such shuttle. The nature of the drive system makes no difference there - warp, impulse, rockets, frantic pushing.
The Galilio Seven. The shuttle was used to explore the Murasaki 312 quasar. The Enterprise was in the area near enough to the quasar to make an impulse shuttle trip logical and practical. Perhaps the quasar also affected warp propulsion in the area making a shuttle necessary. The shuttle crew was exploring the quasar and had not intended to crash on the planetoid.
OTOH, the search area after the crash was stated to span four separate star systems. Kirk sent another shuttle (or perhaps several, dialogue doesn't tell) to conduct this search. This rather implies that those other shuttles were capable of interstellar travel in a short time - unless the
Enterprise herself did a lot of back-and-forth shuttling, which makes one wonder why
she didn't spot the castaways when at Taurus II.
Metamorphosis. The shuttle was used while the Enterprise was elsewhere. The Enterprise later arrives at a pre-arranged rendezvous point. We have no indication why the shuttle was being used or where the Enterprise was when the shuttle went off course. Perhaps the Enterprise should have picked up Commissioner Hedford.
We hear of an asteroid belt, though. It would make sense for the shuttle, rather than the ship, to navigate that belt, now wouldn't it?
Incidentally, the weird space creature of that episode is said to approach the shuttle "at warp", and immediately thereafter said to be "staying right with" the shuttle. The implication might well be there already that the shuttle was at warp, too.
Last Battlefield: Lokai stole a shuttle from Starbase 4 two weeks prior to the episode. The Enterprise encounters the stolen shuttle 3 hours outside of the planet Ariannus. Starbase 4 is some distance from Ariannus. Warp is not explicitly mentioned but the implication is clear.
Indeed. Also, we get another example of starbases having nothing better than further shuttles to make chase of Lokai with!
TAS: Slaver Weapon. Shuttlecraft is en route to Starbase 2.
More like what they in DS9 call a runabout, though. The craft is massive, and would have real trouble fitting inside Kirk's shuttlebay. Plenty of room for a high performance warp engine aboard, I guess.
TMP; Suddenly shuttles need warp sleds. Perhaps it's just this particular shuttle that needs a warp sled. Spock's shuttle travels from Vulcan to Earth.
More like from Vulcan to a point between Earth and V'Ger. Perhaps Vulcans are just weird? The logistics of separate drive and payload stages are always complicated (ask any trucker), so their use might tell us something very specific about the logistics of Vulcan courier services. Beats me what, though.
I'll have to post other eras later. From TOS there is enough evidence to conclude shuttles were warp capable.
The TOS shuttles, that is. And some TAS ones. Plenty of small craft in that era that probably lacked both warp
and impulse drive, though - mostly from TMP.
Timo Saloniemi
