Star Trek Shuttles Are Too Small.

[Sarvek]

I have always appreciated Warped9's shuttles because they always made sense in the design and the placement of all machinery. From the Aquashuttle to the Class H Shuttlecraft, they fit well into TOS and they make a great deal of sense in their design. Keep up the great work Warped9.

 

[Warped9]

If I were designing Star Trek from scratch, even with a transporter system, I'd go for a slightly larger starship to allow for larger shuttlecraft.

 

[USS KG5]

On the flip side of that, you go from ENIAC,

to the Apple MacIntosh,

to portable hard drives today that have up to a TB in storage...

Looks like some things can get much smaller.

Just wait ten years and you will have a 1TB flash drive on your keys.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If I were designing Star Trek from scratch, even with a transporter system, I'd go for a slightly larger starship to allow for larger shuttlecraft.

Nah. I'd just change the nature of transporter technology so that you can only beam things from one transporter to another. Shuttles, therefore, become useful as a transport for a portable transporter pad so things can be beamed back and forth between the ship and the ground (gives you an interesting "We can't beam back to the ship" plot device; something damages the planet-side transporter and a shuttle has to deliver another one).

I wouldn't change the size of them at all, but I might redesign them a little, adding a side hatch and maybe some equipment pylons so the shuttles could be considered equivalent to, say, a Huey or a Blackhawk. Maybe something similar to the Defiant's large shuttlepod: crew compartment with a pair of impulse engines attached.

I'd expect long-range shuttles would be slightly different; come to think of it, I wouldn't mind seeing Andy Probert's "warp sled" idea brought back into the mainstream.

 

[Bill Morris]

I made cutaways of just a few of the newer ones, all with warp drive and impulse, in addition to RCS (which even NASA's orbiters have).

I showed toilets on the type 8 and 9, since the scale made it appropriate to do so.

But yes, these 24-century vessels, at least, are extremely poweful relative to size and mass. Antimatter really packs a punch. And they all have transporters.

Type 8:
http://lcars24.com/schem17.html
Type 9:
http://lcars24.com/schem18.html
Danube class:
http://lcars24.com/schem2.html
Delta Flyer:
http://lcars24.com/schem4.html