So im watching a tos episode and the away team can’t contact the ship and the ship is drawn away from the planet. Now I recall this as sorta a common plot device in star trek. communication is not always blocked but basically the ship has to leave the away team on a plane to deal with something. Here is the thing. Why don’t they ever launch a shuttle to stay at the planet. I mean maybe more than one. This is especially true come tng where the shuttles I think tend to have transporters. I mean feels like a no brainer to me.
It makes so much more sense to send a shuttlecraft in the first place, in every case, even if the mothership isn’t going anywhere and transporters are fully operational.
Is there air? You don’t know. But you’re going to beam me down in nothing but my pajamas? Hell no. I’ll take a shuttle with its shields and weapons and life support systems.
well I think the idea is their sensors are so good they know for sure.
Yeah, but what about all the episodes where they didn’t detect any danger? That’s like half of TOS. By TNG it’d be hubris if they still believed they could know for sure.
They make it out to be like airline travel. It happens but considering the trillions of transports that go fine every day type of thing its barely a blip. Now granted though in tos their primary mission is to go to where no one has gone before I could see your point. You would assume a bit higher caution than going to a colony well within the federations borders.
Starfleet is not good at operational security. Why does the landing party contain half or more department heads? I would start there, either by revamping their guidelines or as viewers suspending disbelief.
I think the shuttle solution is elegant and I’m sure a writers room has discussed it. Today this would be (comparatively) trivially easy to CGI; I suppose during TOS it would have necessitated extra work days for the model unit and a permanent shuttle set, which I don’t think we get until TNG.
Why is the captain always beaming down first and no one is in spacesuits? It’s no wonder half the time they beam someone back an alien life form comes along for the ride.
I can understand the budget constraints for TOS but just saying something like “we’re leaving a comms buoy in orbit” would solve this question, build a little model satellite and keep it on the shelf.
As far as I recall, the reasons for not being able to beam up the crew would be similar to not being able to retrieve a shuttle.
You also had the issue where the expense of having a shuttle on set and adding the VFX would have been higher than transporting the crew, so the writers kept with transporting.
Not sure about all the cases, but sometimes the ship has to exit toute de suite, or has to maintain its shields, or sometimes (like in “Gallileo Seven”) the shuttle is already launched and is now missing. Or like you say communication is blocked, or Kirk & crew are being spoofed by their captors, or the Enterprise is still powerless to act via semi-weekly Q-like entity of choice.
I’m not sure TOS’ show bible has ever been published, but I’m guessing Rodenberry wrote some guidelines about such shuttle-use. Pretty much every single outsider’s script had to be cleaned up in accordance with said bible, even when they knew the guidelines going in.
But the bottom line to me is that like 99% of TV fare, TOS was designed to get the most out of it’s minutes, its actors, its scripts and so forth. If sending out an extra shuttle(s) didn’t work story-wise, then it would have been shut down as a possibility, just like countless other aspects of the show.
