Small Ships, Big Roles: The Misunderstood Role of Shuttle Craft

When you think of a spacecraft that needs a shuttle, or similar small craft, what does it look like? Think about it’s size, role, and capabilities, any trends or rules that would get assembled? I think that small craft are often mishandled in science fiction. Thus in the first Sci-Fi Saturday I’m going to delve into these unsung, underrated, and misused heroes of science fiction.

For the sake of the article teleportation technology doesn’t exist. As it generally fills the same role as the small craft, unless the story needs a small craft. As such I’m going to side line that piece of tech for the moment. I can come back to it at a future date. Today is the small unsung heroes of science fiction.

The first thing that needs to be discussed is the place of the small craft in the world. Generally this can be thought of in two ways, the ship’s boat, or a helicopter. While these two cover a lot of the same space, they are different and need to be handled slightly differently. I am presuming that the small craft are stuck with the larger ship as auxiliaries, and we don’t have space cars.

If we do have space cars, a scenario where small space craft are roughly equivalent to the family station wagon, it would be surprising for there not to be facilities for craft aboard most space craft that are of reasonable size. I am reminded of Serenity, that’s the ship from Firefly, as it has two shuttles despite being quite small at 269ft long, and atmosphere rated. Yet these two little shuttles were functionally space vans; I don’t know if they were bespoke to the Firefly-class or a general port with the two installed simply being the ones that were there when Malcolm picked Serenity up. Regardless if we have space cars I would expect almost every ship larger than a ‘space box truck’ to have a dock for a ‘space van’. I know those aren’t the most academic of terms, yet I suspect most can translate it into their worlds. Presuming space cars aren’t a thing; we are then left with the choice between boats and helicopters. I suppose there’s an argument for the float plane, however I suspect that middle ground will be an outlier.

I’ll start with boats. Historically speaking a ship’s boat or boats were for when the ship couldn’t pull all the way into harbor and needed something to ferry men and supplies to and form the shore. These would be carried aboard for when the shore facilities didn’t have enough to service the ship in question. Likewise in the age of sail they were used to tow the ship into and out of harbor. In modern times there isn’t as much of a need for the ship's boats. Now leaving them for cruise ships and warships. As both may have need for a small craft to run things to the shore or to other vessels.

To convert this to our starbound future I see the ships boat equivalent as being a small vessel that can do most things and interact with all other spacecraft. Meaning they can dock to do ship to ship transfers even if other party doesn’t have their own small craft. They can go down to planets and return to the ship, and in my mind have enough range to go anywhere in the solar system. This would be the craft that says departs for the Moon, or Mars when the ship is in orbit of Earth. I would also suggest this style of craft should be strong enough to work as light tugs to help get a ship in or out of dock. The shuttlecraft from Star Trek generally are the poster children for this, as they are starships in miniature. Which is a good way to approach them.

Helicopters on the other hand are faster, and more flexible, yet can more limited than the ship's boats. The speed and flexibility hopefully is fairly obvious, helicopters are faster and can go over land something boats tend to struggle with. This gives a ship with a helicopter some more options for where it can go. However the limitations are a bit less clear. Helicopters are fragile things meaning they should be in a hanger, which takes up space; they consume a lot more fuel, meaning more needs to be kept aboard. While they can do hoists, the ship that is going to be hoisted to or from needs to have the right space. Plus helicopters tend to be more limited in payload for a given size, meaning a boat that takes up the same space will carry more.

Converting this over the helicopter equivalent small craft are going to be faster and carry less. They may have extra modes of travel, FTL, wings, atmosphere breathing engines, or anything else that will give them better maneuverability over the boat like outlined above. I would also say these guys will need a hanger for long term storage or to be generally useful. It could be a small cramped thing, think U.S.S. Enterprise NX-01’s shuttle pod pay, even if the shuttle pods are more ship’s boats than helicopters. Or something larger and I would also recommend that this style of small craft should be more specialized. Meaning this craft would be specialized into one thing, it could be: reconnaissance, atmospheric landings, search and rescue, scientific data collection, medical evacuation, cargo transfer, or crew transfer.

When it comes to use of any of these small craft in a story I would think about them as ladders. Now for those who don’t know, ladders can be used to cross horizontal gaps as well as vertical ones. Meaning these small craft provide access to places that normally wouldn’t be accessible. The down side is that any ladder becomes a bit of a choke point, only so many people can use it at once and generally speaking it’s single file. Thus use these small craft to give the cast further range, or access to areas the main ship can’t go. It could be as simple as not having the right docking clamps for this particular station or as convoluted as one wants. Just remember that they are being used to limit the access to what’s onboard and to limit the response the main ship can have to the situation. With that I will see you in the next one.

Thanks for reading the first Sci-Fi Saturday. What did you think? I like this and Fantasy-Friday as a back and forth. Let me get into the more specific topics that don’t really fit the Worldbuild Wednesday.