Shuttlecraft Outings - Season Four

Scorpion: 2

• After forcing Species 8472 to withdraw from the Delta Quadrant, Janeway offers a shuttlecraft to her sole surviving Borg guest, in order to allow her to head back to the nearest Borg cube. Seven of Nine declines the offer, terminates their alliance, and announces in her capacity as their friendly Borg representative that Voyager and her crew are to be assimilated. Possibly she may have had second thoughts shortly afterwards, as Janeway's next act is to pull the plug on Seven's link to the collective. The shuttlecraft offer is not renewed. Possibly before Seven regained consciousness somebody reminded the captain that they were in short supply.

The Gift

• Kes is given a shuttlecraft when she has to leave Voyager. Shortly afterwards the cellular flux kicks in again, seemingly for the last time, and she and the shuttlecraft are enveloped in searing white light. The mental shove homewards that she then gave Voyager prevented anybody from hanging around to see if the shuttle survived the experience, but it seems unlikely that it would be able to reassemble its constituent molecules, even if Kes can.

Day Of Honor

• Sent in shuttlecraft Cochrane to retrieve Voyager's ejected warp core, Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres get into a dispute about ownership rights of the core with the Caatati. To show that they mean business, the Caatati blow the Cochrane to bits. I guess that somebody really wanted to make sure that there wasn't any evidence of Threshold left lying around...

Nemesis

• Chakotay strays a little too close to a war zone while on a survey mission, and is fired upon by either the Kradin or the Vori, depending on which of them you ask. When he loses helm control, he does an emergency beam out and lets the shuttle crash without him. You'd have thought that by now he'd feel guilty enough about his track record with shuttles to have fought the controls all the way to the crash site! While his later sighting of shuttlecraft debris can't be taken as reliable evidence, as he's being brainwashed in a holographic simulation at the time, references to the ship back on board Voyager would seem to imply that it is in less than pristine condition. It seems likely that they could have beamed up the bits and recycled some of them though. The debut appearance of Shuttlecraft Jigsaw must be due soon!
• This episode marks Voyager's second shuttlecraft hat trick... and Chakotay manages to personally trash his third shuttle.

Revulsion

• B'Elanna Torres and the Doctor use a shuttlecraft to visit the holojanitor's ship.

The Raven

• Seven's in a snit with the rest of the crew, so she takes a shuttlecraft out for a spin. I only hope that there was time to give her the full crash course on shuttlecraft piloting first! And I hope they have the specification for replicating shuttle bay doors, too... It is left in orbit when she and Tuvok beam down to the moon they are orbiting to investigate the Borg signal she is homing in on, and its subsequent status is not mentioned. However, Voyager then followed the two shuttles into Bomar space and took up close orbit around the same moon. As it had several minutes to kill while Paris was rescuing Seven and Tuvok, there was ample opportunity to either tractor or transport the shuttle back aboard. It certainly wasn't destroyed; under the circumstances shuttle debris would have been commented upon, even if a routine shuttle pickup wasn't deemed worthy of comment.
• Tuvok and Paris take a second shuttle in pursuit. Seven's in a mean mood, so she fires on it. Paris manages to fix it up enough to limp along in pursuit, pick up Seven and Tuvok, and then get it back to Voyager under its own steam, despite shields being down to 50% and only having impulse power available.

Mortal Coil

• Paris and Neelix (who really should know better) go off in a shuttlecraft with Chakotay. Surprisingly, the shuttle makes it back in better shape than Neelix, who's dead at the time.
• Chakotay and Neelix later use the holodeck to rerun a simulation of the accident.

Waking Moments

• Paris dreams about crashing a shuttle. I really don't understand why it wasn't Chakotay...

Message In A Bottle

• The Doctor claims that he's had two piloting lessons in a shuttlecraft on the holodeck. It doesn't appear to be adequate instruction to enable him to figure out the USS Prometheus's controls though.

Hunters

• Tuvok and Seven take a shuttlecraft closer to the relay station than Voyager dare go, in an attempt to stabilize its containment field. They are attacked by a Hirogen ship, which disables their navigational sensors, communications, warp engines and weapons, and try to tempt it to follow them even closer to the relay station in the hope that the bigger ship's greater vulnerability to gravitational eddies will allow them to escape. They fail, and are hauled in on the end of a tractor beam. With them captive, the Hirogen head for Voyager, leaving the unmanned shuttle behind, emitting the automated distress signal which later alerts Voyager to trouble. With the shuttle closer to the relay station than they dare go, and the Hirogen ship between them and it, it has to be assumed that Voyager had no opportunity to retrieve the abandoned shuttle before the station's containment field collapsed and pulled everything close to it into a black hole. Something small and metallic that could well have been a shuttlecraft can clearly be seen being pulled in. Voyager itself barely escapes the implosion, but the Hirogen ship wasn't so lucky and neither, I suspect, was the shuttlecraft.

Vis À Vis

• Paris tells his new pal Steth about the time that he borrowed his father's shuttlecraft when he was sixteen. Seems he left it at the bottom of Lake Tahoe... I guess that counts as destroyed (chalk another one up to Paris and let Chakotay breathe a little easier), but as it was Admiral Paris's shuttle and not Voyager's we won't be counting it here.
• The alien wearing Janeway's DNA steals Paris's souped up coaxial warp drive shuttlecraft and launches it without clearance. Fortunately, Paris knows its vulnerabilities, since he's the one who suggested the improvements that gave the experimental warp drive the stability to work properly in the first place. He and the real Steth disrupt its engines by pushing a chromoelectric pulse at its polaric modulator. It never makes it to warp.

The Omega Directive

• Tom Paris is ordered to modify a shuttlecraft to withstand extreme thermal stress, while B'Elanna Torres is charged with reinforcing its hull. This is when Janeway still thinks it might be possible to mount a small scale mission, with just herself and Seven, in order to neutralise Omega. When the full scale of the undertaking is discovered, the shuttlecraft mission is abandoned in favour of roping in Voyager's entire crew.

Demon

• Tom Paris and Harry Kim take a shuttlecraft with heavy shield modifications down to a demon class planet in order to mine some desperately needed deuterium. They lose attitude control on the way down, but Paris seems relatively unworried taking the shuttle down on manual. In fact, he invites Kim to sit back and enjoy the ride. The set down is a bit bumpy, but it's definitely a controlled landing. Voyager itself eventually lands, but we'll assume that they remembered to pick up the shuttlecraft at some point before they left the planet.
• Chakotay offers to take down a second shuttle and look for the two missing crewmembers when Paris and Kim don't report in. Janeway declines, but lets him land Voyager instead.

Hope And Fear

• Tom Paris and Neelix take a shuttle to a trading colony to pick up supplies. Paris reports back that it's going to be so loaded down on the return journey that he won't be able to make half impulse, but other than possibly exceeding its loading limits it suffers no damage.
• The so-called USS Dauntless has no shuttlecraft. Where's the fun in that? It had to be a phony!