Shuttlecraft Outings - Season Two

Initiations

• Chakotay's shuttle gets shot at by a baby Kazon. Then it gets tractored aboard a big Kazon ship. When Chakotay and his new Kazon pal escape that, the Kazon blow it to bits. They're nothing if not persistent!

Non Sequitur

• Harry Kim and a parallel universe's Tom Paris manage to get a brand new runabout prototype blown up. Of course, stealing it and being chased by a Nebula class starship which assumes that they're Maquis spies probably didn't help any. But since the Yellowstone doesn't belong to Voyager's universe, let alone the ship, it doesn't count.
• The Drake, which Harry blew up when it ran into a temporal inversion fold in the space-time matrix, does count though. And despite the fact that he manages to get safely back to his own universe by reproducing the conditions of the original accident in the Yellowstone, the fate of the shuttle doesn't change. It still goes boom.

Parturition

• Kes does her shuttlecraft training in a holodeck simulation, under the careful (and sneaky) eye of instructor Tom Paris.
• Tom Paris ("Hell, I'm the best pilot you could have!") and Neelix crash a shuttle on Planet Hell. There's no chance of patching it up and flying it out again - it's half buried in the planet surface, and it's got a big hole in it which leaks atmosphere. Ultimately they get beamed back aboard Voyager. Nobody mentions beaming back the shuttle bits. You'd think after losing three shuttles in as many weeks they'd need the parts...

Persistence Of Vision

• When the crew's minds are attacked by the Bothan and they become delusional, B'Elanna Torres has an imaginary encounter with Chakotay in Engineering during which they conclude that they are the only two people still free of control on the ship. Chakotay suggests that the two of them should flee in an escape pod to a nearby M class planet, and attempt to get help. You can tell that he's a delusion; he obviously isn't thinking clearly if he opts for a pod rather than the much faster and warp capable shuttles, which might take less than a week to reach that help...
• Kes's Neelix delusion tries a similar tactic on her. He suggests that they should use his own little ship to get away from Voyager. It's nice to hear that it's still aboard. Presumably it's been gathering dust in a deep dark corner of the shuttlebay ever since Caretaker.

Tattoo

• You'd think Chakotay would know better than to take a shuttle down to a planet which formed a storm every time Voyager locked on transporter co-ordinates, wouldn't you? He doesn't. They get down safely, storms notwithstanding, but the ship then disappears off Voyager's sensors. While looking for it (and Chakotay) they very nearly crash Voyager, but the storms dissipate just in time after Chakotay swaps tattoo designs with the natives. Chakotay beams back up along with the away team searching for him, but as it was reported that the shuttle had been located, I'm sure that Voyager sent someone else down to fly it back.

Maneuvers

• Having drilled a hole in Voyager's shields with weapons fire, the Kazon use it to send through a small shuttle, with its bow modified sufficiently to enable them to crash it through the ship's outer hull wall. It ends up wedged half inside Cargo Bay 2, after which the intruders get out, hijack a transporter module, and beam back to their own ship.
• After inspection of the damage, B'Elanna Torres suggests that they should tow the Kazon shuttle out with one of Voyager's own, in order to enable repairs of the hull breach to begin.
• Chakotay "borrows" a shuttle in order to go after the Kazon to retrieve the stolen transporter module. He attempts to mask its existence by cutting power down to just manoeuvring thrusters and five per cent of life support, but Seska's wise to such old Maquis tricks and spots the "intermittent EM readings" for what they are, a shuttle running shadow manoeuvres. She deploys photonic charges to disable the shuttle, and Chakotay goes to Plan B, where he fakes loss of control by taking the inertial dampers offline, lets them tow his shuttle in, beams off it to destroy the module, and wipes the shuttle's computer core so that it's of no use to the Kazon and their hunger for technology. Or that's his intent anyway, although I'd tend to think that the hardware alone might be of some interest, even if they don't have the software to control it any more. Voyager gets back both its shuttle and its errant First Officer via an exchange of hostages - they snatch four Kazon Majes and swap them for Chakotay and the shuttlecraft (the shuttle's the one worth three majes, obviously!).

Prototype

• Voyager uses a shuttle to sneak through the Pralor ship's defence field and transport out B'Elanna Torres, who is a prisoner aboard. Unfortunately, Plan A (rotate the shield harmonics and synchronise with the defence field) doesn't work - the shuttle bounces off it. The shuttlecraft pilot, Tom Paris, is less than impressed by Tuvok's Plan B (use the hole in the field that the attacking Cravic ship is opening with its disrupters), since it means flying into the direct line of fire and then trying not to get hit... By some miracle, he manages it, and successfully snatches back Torres. The warring Pralor and Cravic ships continue to ignore the shuttlecraft as it heads for home, where it arrives without so much as a scorch mark on the paintwork.

Alliances

• Neelix takes a shuttlecraft when he goes to look up an old acquaintance and ask for his help in negotiating an alliance with the Kazon. The negotiations don't go too well, but the shuttle doesn't get a scratch.

Threshold

• Tom Paris pilots a holodeck simulation of a shuttlecraft, trying to determine what would happen if he tried to crack the warp ten barrier in it. Round about warp 9.95 the port nacelle pylon fractures and is ripped right off the shuttle, the simulation ends, and he gets to sit down rather abruptly in an empty hologrid. And all before the opening credits sequence.
• After some reminiscences on the loss of warp nacelles from Neelix, Paris has a moment of inspiration as to what the problem actually is: the alloy from which the hull of the shuttle is composed is depolarising, and creating a difference in velocity between the shuttle and its nacelles. With a depolarisation matrix in place around the fuselage, they run the holodeck simulation one more time and this time the holoshuttle successfully makes it past warp ten.
• Tom Paris takes a real shuttle, the Cochrane out to try crossing the threshold for real, courtesy of the souped-up warp drive he and his friends have built to take advantage of a superior brand of dilithium crystals that Voyager has come across in the Delta Quadrant. He vanishes from the ship's sensors, but reappears almost immediately. The shuttle isn't damaged (although some might think that its record-breaking Warp 10 flights and all the nonsense that follows them might have caused it undue mental stress), but Tom himself is unconscious when Voyager tractors him in. It turns out to be nothing more than a little sensory overload from experiencing the sensation of being everywhere in the universe simultaneously. Or, at least, that's what they think at first.
• The warp-mutated Paris breaks out of confinement in Engineering, where the Doctor is trying to force his DNA to revert by bombarding it with controlled bursts of antiprotons, and heads for his transwarp capable shuttle. On the way there he knocks out and kidnaps Captain Janeway, and takes her to transwarp with him when Shuttlecraft Cochrane leaves the ship. It takes three days for Voyager to catch up with them, where salamander-Paris and salamander-Janeway have abandoned the shuttle in orbit over the planet where they've chosen to settle down and have little salamanders. Since discovery of the shuttle above the planet is how Voyager tracks them down, one presumes that it was ultimately tractor-beamed back into the shuttlebay.

Investigations

• Tom Paris's shuttle gets blown up by the Kazon, but fortunately it's one of theirs anyway, so it doesn't count.

Innocence

• A shuttle crash lands on a Drayan moon. Add one more dead ensign to the tally, but its other occupant is Tuvok, who manages to repair it well enough to lift off before the rescue party gets there.
• Amazingly enough, they (Janeway and Paris) manage to touch down their shuttle unscathed.

Tuvix

• After transporting in possession of the symbiogenetic orchid is found not to be a good idea, Chakotay takes an away team down to the surface in a shuttlecraft to collect more samples of the offending plant. Amazingly enough, he encounters no problems.
• The same is true of the shuttlecraft Paris and Torres later take down in order to do the transporter tests, although the more cautious Paris delays his journey until the morning because he doesn't like the planet's overnight weather conditions.

Resolutions

• Voyager leaves a shuttle behind with Janeway and Chakotay when it has to go on its way home without them. Curiously, when the cure is found for their infection and they can come home, they opt to beam up rather than fly the shuttle back. Let's hope it didn't get forgotten!

Basics: 1

• Tom Paris's shuttle gets fired on by the Kazon, as he attempts to slip though their blockade and make a run back towards a friendly Talaxian fleet. Communications with the shuttle are lost, and the Kazon report it destroyed. Obviously we believe them... it's not as if we'd expect Paris to show up next season or anything, is it?