At any rate, Type 18 is the smallest craft with explicit, built-in guns in evidence. From VOY on, the artists began drawing phaser strips onto their shuttles, starting with Type 8. But Type 18 has what appears to be three pairs of TMP style ball emitters on the dorsal side of its "hem" (I wonder if there were any on the ventral side which we never got to see), plus that suggestive box on the roof with two barrels.
Why arm these things? They were never deployed offensively AFAWK, and the heroes Defiant in general saw no reason to use shuttles for any purpose, unless forced by weird circumstance involving spatiotemporal anomalies. Perhaps Sisko thought he would need force multipliers, but never did. Or perhaps Starfleet originally thought a Borg-fighter would need these things, and these were the only auxiliaries compatible with the ship when Sisko repurposed her as a Dominion-scouter. The guns might have been something the heroes never could be bothered to remove, even though they had never been useful.
Timo Saloniemi
I suppose actually the Type 18 might have been something added as part of the “Dominion Scouter” role change: I’m not sure a Borg destroyer would have much use for auxiliaries but a ship on clandestine missions might. They could be used to do scouting, since they’re so small they might “fly under the radar” or not be considered threats and so scour an enemy. There is also the need to get through shields to land, which might be useful for clandestine operations, since you aren’t supposed to be able to beam through shields (unless the writers forgot this week).
It actually seems like it’d be better as a supplement to conventional shuttles, like something you’d launch a flight of four of to escort another shuttle. Which is not how we see them used in cannon at all...
Or maybe the LD just got tired of Type 15s always getting shot down and demanded something better.
Interestingly, they are supposed to be carried by the Sabre class too, presumably because larger shuttles don’t fit in its bays either?
I think it’s a interesting concept for a tactical shuttle but ultimately a bit hampered by its size: it can only really fit two people. That really limits the versatility compared to even one of Voyager’s speedboat shuttles. Given the later appearance of the Type 10 shuttle, however, Sisko must not have thought much of the Type 18 either.
I feel like the “tactical shuttle” would be the closest that Trek could reasonably come to other franchises conceptions of fighters as small, sometimes one man craft that are strictly military in nature. And even then, I’d think they’d be special mission craft more akin to SEAL vehicles than carrier fighters. I for one feel like the Orville’s cloaked shuttlecraft are kind of a stroke of brilliance: they’d be great in Trek for *not* getting shot down in “hot” situations and would allow you to hide on those pre first contact missions where you are trying to be subtle. And I imagine it’d be much, much easier to build a cloaking shuttle that might actually hold up against starship sensors that it’d be to build a shuttle that could fight ships.
To me what Trek calls fighters are more solidly equivalent to WW2 MTBs than planes: small, fast, heavily armed craft with multi-man crews that are essentially just miniature versions of capital ships, with only durability and range being the deciding difference between them.
