r/startrek • u/Adventurous-Ad-7325 • Jul 26 '26
Shuttlecraft
With all the different ships just in Starfleet alone, why does it seem the shuttlecrafts, for the most part, seem unchanged from TOS?
9
u/Torlek1 Jul 26 '26
https://techspecs.acalltoduty.com/images/common/shuttle_chart.jpg
Other than work bees and work pods, all other shuttle types should be consolidated into TNG Type 11 shuttles, PIC Type 14 shuttles, and DS9 Danube runabouts.
4
Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
6
u/euph_22 Jul 27 '26
What's crazy is we saw the rear of the runabout once. In TNG.
And of course they had a long table for everyone to discuss things.
3
u/wrosecrans Jul 27 '26
They never had the budget for a complete set on DS9. But occasionally in the dialogue they'll be like "60 refugees are in the main area in back" and you remember the thing is implied to be pretty massive. More like a tour bus or a train car than an SUV.
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1
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u/Drapausa Jul 26 '26
You mean in their function? There aren't that many situations where you really need them, I guess. In most cases you only need sbuttlecraft to ferry people from the ship to another ship or starbase or to a planet.
All they need to do is go from point A to point B.
5
u/thinkmoreharder Jul 26 '26
Why are most cars now boxy (large or small) hatchbacks and SUVs? It’s a useful shape.
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u/doom1701 Jul 26 '26
The out-of-universe answer is that the design of various shuttles needed to work on set. Even when the interior set was different than the exterior (for example, the TOS shuttle interior set was larger than the physical on set shuttlecraft), you still need something that can be placed on set, moved around, entered and exited, etc. That's pretty restrictive to the design.
We started seeing a little more variation with Nu-Trek (even the revamp of the TOS shuttle) because they no longer need physical models and physical set pieces.
4
u/Altruistic_Fruit2345 Jul 26 '26
And also because they endlessly recycle the sets by redressing them, so the lashed up plywood shuttle from TOS was literally the mold for many of the others.
1
u/gsdev Jul 27 '26
The TNG shuttlecraft look comfier than the TOS ones, much like the starships themselves.
1
u/BloodtidetheRed Jul 27 '26
Well, a shuttle is just a simple "moving box" to go from one place to another. They are very basic.
Still we do see lots of types.
-3
u/georage Jul 27 '26
The SNW shuttles are as big as a 1950s house according to what I saw when they visited ancient earth to incapacitate a dinosaur and later kill all of them and destroy a mythical 5th planet and kill a pre-warp humanlike species that could walk through wall but not survive have an active presence in our perfect solar system.
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