The Shuttle that Set the Precedent

Hey, Rick! The gram is a unit of mass, brother. Love the vids, keep it up!

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Unpopular opinion. The windows are pointless if they're that high

The design was also the basis for Gorn and Orion vessels in SFB.

One of the things I've always hated about star trek, is that they always try to fit the low-budget arcaic designs into cannon rather than just making the discovery Enterprise design the real canonical design.

The Class F being "Boring" makes sense in a way for the time too. It doesn't look particularly interesting to us as viewers, and nor to anyone who might be looking to pick on someone else. Minimal fuel supply, no weaponry, very basic engine tech and no "pretty" lines makes it a rather pointless target to attack unless you know its ferrying someone or something important.

Similarly, it makes good use of hangar space by putting as much interior space (more than physically possible with basic 3 dimensional physics) as possible into the design, without being overly bulky. Rounded corners are nice, but they take away from the total area possible of the shape.

Finally, it's going to be very easy to repair compared to a more complicated shape. Have a damaged "windscreen?" Good thing it's a flat panel, just pop it out and pop in a new one, no worries about weird curves or material stress.

Well, there were the shuttles used in TMP before we get to the TNG era shuttles.

"Can you look out Starboard to see if..." It did have some serious design flaws - its reliability was shocking since it needed a full engine rebuild every three weeks of service.

That made it risky to use it outside the sensor range of a long range Starship in case it broke down.

Constitution class ships couldn't use it as a scout without having to take into account that its engines might pack up if it was in use for more than a week.

What if it had issues while in a gravity well?

"Can you look out Starboard to see if there's a clearing to put down in? The engine is cycling badly, and it might give out."

"Because It's overdue for maintenance, but what with that incident last month engineering was prioritising repairing the ship, those plasma hits needed a lot of work. It's not like the Intrepid resets to an undamaged state every week or so."

So they made a GTi version as well?

If you read The Q Conflict comic book, Worf has to spend time on Kirk's TOS Enterprise, and he was quite antsy while on board. He also has to ride in one of these shuttles on an away mission competition against the Enterprise E, the Voyager, and the Defiant. The shuttle's pilot, who was I think from Deep Space 9, remarked that they don't make shuttles like that anymore. And Worf said "GOOD!". I will say this though. Despite Kirk's technology being the most outdated in the competition, his away team was the best prepared, and were the only ones to actually equip survival gear.

Star Trek's 57 Chevy.

Any lower decks worth their Federation credits has one of these squirreled away in their back shuttle bay.

The thing I like about the class F shuttle is how functional the design feels. Unlike later shuttles that have a lot more put into the aesthetics, the class F looks very utilitarian. With efficient use of space. Especially as it looks like you could fit a lot of square cargo boxes in it.

Thanks for this one. I always thought these were actually pretty cool looking little vehicles.

That intro boy oh boy. 🥴

The panel van of star trek

it's nice that Voyager took inspiration from the episode Galileo Seven, but it just got ridiculous after awhile 'cause I'm pretty sure they had at least one shuttle crash episode every season. didn't know that Crashium was so abundant in the Delta Quadrant.

The model without nacelles looks a lot like the Executive Shuttle !

Take a drink when Rick says MYRIAD 😂

If it wasn't for the deal, ironically, the shuttles of Star Trek would have been worse because they would've been stuck in the 50s and 60s whereas instead we got a space Isuzu box truck. Which fits the theme way better and overall gave us some of the greatest geometric ships ever invented so the class F gets an A.

People call this shuttle boxy but I think it’s beautiful ❤

At a guess, the older, slower models of these would have been assigned to planets or Star Bases, as they didn't need to travel far. Upgraded versions would have been assigned to faster, newer capital ships as they came into service. The fastest ones being sent out with the Constitution Class ships - it would make sense since having a shuttle that couldn't keep up with it's carrier ship would mean the carrier ship would have to slow down so not as to out run their own shuttles. Four of these on a "Connie" would mean you could explore five solar systems at once - or even keep the Constitution Class ship safe in interstellar space while the shuttle did scouting missions.

OF course, with today's drone tech, explorer ships would carry fleets of un-crewed drones to expand their ability to explore space. Safer, faster and quicker - than one ship going from system to system. The drones could scout ahead, they the explorer ship would go to the most interesting systems or planets - and avoid dangerous areas of space.

I love this design

Boxy, yes. But classic mid-century design! Mid-23rd century 😄

I've always hated most of the Star Trek shuttle designs, but this is near the top of my list. Besides ever since TNG I realized Trek had a problem in that they should be using shuttles as fighters like a modern aircraft carrier rather than engaging in battle directly. Voyager was the closest to that and had the best looking shuttle craft.

Its so ugly.... but i dont blame them if they got it free. Gotta take that deal.

A very minor and extremely nerdy and largely inconsequential correction of my own. Kirk said in The Galileo 7, point blank and with no equivocation that the Shuttlecraft was 24 feet long. Which of course is 7.3152 meters. So what exactly is your source I am just curious that it's really not 24 feet long but actually 6.8 meters which would be 22.309 feet? But still totally cool video bro!

Are you sure about the 0,5c ? I thought impulse goes up to 0,25c.

Can we stop trying to shoehorn STD designs into the actual TOS era? Just admit and get comfortable with STD/SNW not being direct lead-ins to TOS.

Original design of Class F Shuttle resemble Aurora class, sometimes incorrectly called Class J. But this term was actually a reference to old United Earth Freighters used as equivalent of world "Junk" (what are classic Chinese sails ships). So crewman was basically saying that it is a old, obsolete design. Not that it is a name. Captain Pike also suffered damage in Class J ship, what probably was a Exeter class Cruiser. What was basically a Columbia style version of Bonaventure class (no confuse with Ceres class SS Bonaventure). Anyway, I suspect that in SNW that term refer actually to Sombra class, co Conie-style proto-Excelsior from the show.

My take on Class F warp is that it clearly has separate nacelles and impulse engines. So it obviously could fly at warp. But! That was more for tactical deployment, not allowing really a travel between planets. So it was probably something below Warp 2. And well, if they did have really such poor reliability. I do see why they didn't use Warp, until emergency demanded it.

It's an easy enough design to show to kids then take some cardboard and duck tape and let them live out their fantasy of being Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

I figured the TOS shuttles were boxy due to budget for the modeling and set piece. Your point about them being cheap for the Federation to churn out is also valid, the shuttles don't have a great survival rate. Though others like the Delta Flyer are built fancier, and Lower Decks has the hooptie Sequoia on blocks when it wasn't beating the Packlids. The shuttles can be a minor character for the main ships, but they can have some personality if written well.

IT doesn't look as cool as the shuttles in TNG did, but in reality it's probably a more practical design. They're launching from within a starship, so they're already in space. Aerodynamics mean absolutely nothing when there's no atmosphere.

Basically, the Class F is the VW/Combi van of the Trek universe. Despite being called a 'shuttle' (which would be just a ground-to-orbit craft), what it technically is what other settings would call an in-system or interplanetary craft..it has low FTL speed in order to travel from one end of the system to another in a decent amount of time, but it'd take far too long to get to another starsystem. Then TNG kinda mixes this up a bit, with Shuttle pods taking the older shuttlecraft role, with TNG Shuttlecraft (and the Runabouts after them) being light intersystem ships with higher FTL speeds.

In truth, to many people make errors with these shuttles...

warp core- i don't think the f class had a warp core but instead used a fusion core that was part of its impulse drive. meaning it needed deuterium fuel, but other "power" could be used to break down and create deuterium to refuel the tanks.

with just fusion power it could likely just break warp 1 maybe 1.5 but if it carried a warp sustainer, much like probes and torpedoes.. a ship traveling at warp 7 could "launch it" at warp speed, it would capture part of that ships warp bubble and keep it running, and while it could slow down it couldn't regain speed.

As such it could be tossed twoards a system at warp 7... and coast there at that speed but would have to make its way back at warp 1 at best... also no turning at warp speeds so... if it had to decelerate and drop out to make a turn... it would need to start up again at warp 1 from there for the rest of the trip.

little things like this fit with the small size and profile of said ships.

I went down the rabbit hole reading about the class F about 6 months ago, and tead about them not neing warp capable. That made no sense to me based on how they were used. With only sublight speeds, it would only work as a taxi to and from orbit. It would barely be useful for inter-system travel, let along the interstellar space "lifeboat" lind of episodes where the hero ahip is nowhere nearby.

Therefore, my jead canon has always been cruise at 3, top out at 5 in bursts. That hits the sweet spot between being just a transporter alternate, and a full flesged starship.

Cool vehicle!! The first and best!

The Class F is more like the WW2 Jeep or Universal Carrier (Bren Gun Carrier). They are basic but highly adaptable and ended up doing things they were never designed for but could do.

Space Volvo. It’s boxy, but good.

I envision a scene where the Mercury Seven are represented by famous Starfleet pilots giving their recommendations to the shuttle designers.

Shuttles being very low warp capable might mean that they didn't have to use the exotic matter of the bigger, faster ships, and could be repaired and patched up far more readily.

After all, Zefram Cochrane was able to build this in a missile silo! With a box of scraps!

While the class F may seem unappealing, I rather appreciate it from most angles. Yes its boxy and simple, but it works. Too bad TOS was unable to use it more often due to development time and cost. Also, Certifiably in game forgot to mention she shuttle's transporter. It has been retconed now that the shuttle has a transporter, though never seen in the show, since Discovery and Strange New Worlds shuttled have transporteds 🤓

The class F is the 23rd century version of a British Transit Van.

Hello Rick! All here

An English guy saying "aluminum"? Nope. Stopped watching. Sort your life out.

In the Star Fleet Universe, which is an alternate Star Trek Universe based solely on TOS, TAS and the Star Fleet Technical Manual, the Type-F or Administrative Shuttle has a phaser coverage of 360°.
It can also be adapted to fire drones/missiles or equipped with antimatter bombs for suicide runs.

(And yes, Interplay's Starfleet Command is a mash-up of the SFU with TMP-era aesthetics.)

While the inconsistency of the interior to exterior is just well something to ignore. Variances in performance and features is a little easier to tack on viable in-universe reasoning too. Tack on a secondary model number to it indicating a variation of the base model with differing features. For example you have say F-0 (base) which has X model of nacelles, but the model F-1 has a different set of nacelles even though they look the same. We have real world examples of this kind of things in automobiles, planes, and various devices. In some instances, the only outward difference between 2 model variations of a device might be the presence of a single port on the device. Sometimes, in the model without the port, you can still see the location where the port would go, it has a blanking cover over it. I have seen in such cases where even the circuit board would have the printing on it indicating where the port would have been soldered to the board for the model with the port. In cars, in some cases, you could have 2 almost identical variations of the same model and on the surface side by side they look exactly the same. Look closer and one of the 2 might have an extra word attached to the model name, and look inside and oh that one has an extra feature in its dashboard or infotainment system the base model doesn't have. Often I have seen where the base name is whats printed on front face and major displaces for the device, which can give the impression that if you have 2 side by side their identical. But look (usually on the bottom) at the identifier sticker or plate and the full model number and you might find extra bits (usually after a - ) indicating that you may actually have 2 different variations of the model of the device. And in some cases, there may also be a version number. IN the case of devices, especially for computers, this can have a big impact on exactly which drivers and software you need for the device.

According to Kirk the shuttle was 25ft so that would be 7.62m🫠

The Enterprise could do anything ... except figure out how to bolt the crews chairs to the deck!