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Stadi's shuttle

Or then the station, in the aftermath of "JemHadar"/"The Search", was a flurry of Starfleet activity, with at least three starships and their shuttles in attendance, and the camera only occasionally got pointed at the one hosting Stadi and Paris.

Timo Saloniemi
 
The logistics of this are a bit on the non-sequitur side, much like the inane dialogue in the DSC pilot episode: we get cool introductions, but they make no real sense in-universe.

Where is Tom coming from? More importantly, where is he going? Not to Voyager, since he's next seen stationside, and is yet to report to the ship at that time. So, did Stadi fetch him from a location other than the ship or the station? A starship that was not docked to the station, and had no interest in docking (plenty of those are seen hovering in the background in the later episodes)? Unlikely - Tom could have simply beamed over, then. More probably, Stadi would have been fetching Paris all the way from Bajor, a doable trip for a shuttle.

Alternately, Paris has already arrived at DS9, and is getting a pure sightseeing tour. But Stadi sounds like the last person interested in giving one to him. That is, she's eager to rattle off the specs of her ship, perhaps to a fellow helm officer even, but she appears to be making an exception in case of Tom...

Where did Harry come from? If from Bajor, why not share a ride with Tom? It's not as if Tom were being hauled around in secrecy, or in chains and under guard.

How many ships fly from Earth to DS9 per week, at that time and age? Would it be reasonable for our two heroes to take different ships? Kim could of course be coming from some other point of origin altogether, but we'd then lose the "really fresh out of the Academy" angle to his character. So perhaps Harry just arrived on the E-D, which chose not to dock because of the congestion caused by Janeway's ride, and this is where the other shuttle came from... (We'd then certainly expect a Janeway vs. Picard kowtow where issues of high moral standards are being discussed over a shared cup of tea or coffee, with Sisko left seething outside for his lack of a proper starship!)

Timo Saloniemi
According to the Voyager book Caretaker which is based on the script for the episode, Stadi let Paris walk away of his own when she stayed on the shuttle "to batten things down after the docking".

According to the same book, Paris was met by Odo and another member of the DS9 security team, a Bajoran. Paris thought that Odo and the other security guy were around to check up on him and came up with some comments which obviously didn't amuse Odo and his colleague. Too late Paris realized that Odo and his colleagues greted everyone who arrived at the station out of courtesy.

So Paris decided to have a beer at Quarks' before checking in on Voyager. After all, it was his first possibility to feel like a free man again after his time at the penal colony in New Zealand.

As for Kim, according to the book Caretaker he arrived to Deep Space Nine one day before Paris.

When he first checked in, only Dr, Fitzgerald was available there so he spent the day shopping at the station, eating at the Klingon restaurant (and get sick according to the book), talking himself into a game of raquetball with a friendly medical lieutenant (obviously Julian Bashir) and attend a extremely strange Tellarite production of The Cherry Orchard before returning to the ship reralizing that "this is now my home". He had no idea that it would be his permanent home for seven years! :techman:

Anyway, the next day he went to Quark's where he met both the owner of the nice bar and Tom Paris and the rest is history!

The story in the book Caretaker is basically the same as the episode but woth lot of small details which makes it very interesting to read and I consider the details which were left out in the episode as valuable as what we saw on screen. :bolian:
 
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Well, the big problem with any "stuff happens" extra story there is that our two new crew members are supposed to report in, yet the aftermath of the Quark scene is when they do so. Kim looks like the type who's eager to please: it's difficult to imagine he would postpone his meeting with the Captain unless he had to.

So the story we need is the one explaining the absence of Janeway from her ship...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Kim looks like the type who's eager to please: it's difficult to imagine he would postpone his meeting with the Captain unless he had to.
And yet he did, doesn't the doctor give him shit about not having done it yet?

Even though Janeway doesn't seem put out by it, Kim and Paris only bother to check in moments before the ship leaves DS9. Which seems weird, thinking about it now.
 
Good point. I gather the mission would be hush-hush: Starfleet would suspect Maquis leaks aboard DS9. But it should also be time-critical, yet there's no sense of hurry, and no summons for either Tom or Harry when the captain does get aboard. Rather, the ship sails out immediately after Tom has wandered to Janeway's ready room at his own leisurely pace. Perhaps the two combined can be used to squeeze some sense out of this?

That is, the crew, old and new, is left in a limbo for a day or two, waiting for they-do-not-know what. Janeway not only knows that they are waiting for Paris to shuttle over from Bajor, but is following his every step, with a bit of help from Stadi - and from Sisko's team, which tracks Tom aboard the station just in case the rascal tries to make contact with the Maquis or something.

Tom is the bottleneck, the kingpin, the payload. No wonder they have his transportation rotate registries every three minutes!

Timo Saloniemi
 
I didn't think about it at the time but after this thread the logistics do seem a bit weird.

Regarding shuttle types - the Type 6 was used in the later seasons of TNG and the Type 8 was a facelift (silver instead of beige, pointier nacelles) for the early seasons of VOY. The Type 9/Class 2 ("speedboat") doesn't appear until Threshold, although it is later established to have been there from the beginning.

The Type 6 and Type 8 are so similar in design that even the production team got them mixed up a lot - there are some episodes (such as The Raven) in which a single shuttle will flip between types in alternating shots.
 
To beat a dead hobby-horse, we never really heard "Type 9" associated with the sleek speedboat. Its creator liked to think of it as Type 12 instead, while the unseen Type 9 left behind in "Resolutions" might well have been a larger type for the Captain Bligh type voyage that was postulated for it, rather than the notoriously cramped speedbboat.

Also, larger is faster in Trek, super-dilithium-boosted testbeds notwithstanding. So it would be fun for the "Resolution" Type 9 to be the same as in the TNG Tech Manual, a big cargo shuttle with nacelles twice as long as in the competing types...

LDS now throws Type 6a in the mix, plus shows the heroes bolting unusual nacelles to their hobby project. Perhaps the letter could mark engine variants, so that some of the purported Type 8 shuttles here legitimately can have Type 6 style nacelles every now and then. Although mid-flight swaps sound like more of a chore than mid-flight changing of registry pennants!

Timo Saloniemi
 
The Ent-D was destroyed some time in 2371, and VOY season 1 takes place in 2371. If we go the confusing route of trying to make sense of stardates, then Voyager was launched on stardate 48038.5 according to the ship's dedication plaque, and the Enterprise survivors were being picked up after the crash on stardate 48650.1 according to Picard's captain's log. In "Caretaker," Janeway records a stardate of 48315.6 in her log. So assuming those numbers are chronological, then the Ent-D was in service at the time when Voy was at DS9.

Kor
And her compliment of shuttles repurposed…with a lax paint job if the dates didn’t match.

The DS9 uniforms bothered me at first. I liked those for stations.
 
Nah, Picard just loaned Janeway that shuttle. She promised to have it back to him after this quick Maquis mission.
 
That or Voyager had a little shuttle production factory on Deck 15, and she had produced a spare shuttle for the Enterprise, at Picard's request, since he didn't have one.
 
Now that I see this thread, I have a better question.

Tom Paris was not technically released from prison, but was made an 'observer' for the mission. Doing this, Janeway would help him in his next outmate review, meaning he was still a prisoner.

So why was Tom not escorted by a security officer the entire time? Or at least followed by one.

Unless they put a tracking device inside him, which Starfleet could do, but that feels more like a Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order thing to do.
 
Tom doing something criminal and Maquis-related would in all likelihood be a welcome thing - this would help Starfleet expose more of the Maquis operations, to little extra cost. That is, Paris would hardly attempt to escape unless he had a realistic plan, and that one probably would involve the Maquis, there being nobody else interested in helping him out.

And Paris spilling his guts on the mission to extricate Tuvok would be unlikely to do much harm, as the extraction supposedly was being done because Tuvok already was two minutes away from being exposed for a wiseguy. If anything, Janeway would welcome extra intrigue relating to that, because extracting Tuvok from the current "Maybe in the Badlands, missing for unknown reasons" jam would be way more difficult than from "In a known Maquis high security base, being timidly interrogated by ex-Starfleeters and other wussies".

No real need to insert a tracker in Tom's intestines when he's inside Starfleet-controlled facilities the whole time. DS9 is actually ideal for being that but not appearing to be that, perhaps prompting Tom to act and reveal his cards; between themselves, Janeway, Sisko and Odo could handle that situation.

Timo Saloniemi
 
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The shuttle could have been auto-piloted back to the Enterprise-D after it dropped off Stadi and Paris.
 
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