As the builder of both the Delta Flyer and AeroShuttle (co-designer) , you got that story spot on. It was an unacceptable answer both within the "story" and the "production". I personally feel it was truly because Mojo and I thought of it as opposed to the Producers. Drop me a pm if you want to know more Dave. Thanks for doing this segment.😏
But all in all, we got the Delta Flyer for it and it was awesome! Great work man! Of course there would be much better ways of setting that up. Alice could have been an interface rather than whole ship and she could have been installed then ruined the Yacht.
There is a video on youtube that counted up all of the times that Voyager fired a photon torpedo (when it was stated they had a set number), so it wouldn't shock me to find one for shuttles either. Would link the video, but comments don't like links. I'm sure you can find it with a quick search.
I personally always thought Star Trek was afraid of looking like Star Wars, so they never wanted to have "starfighters" become a prevelent thing in the universe.
Phasers pretty much negate the worth of any fighters given that they can one-shot them pretty easily...as we've seen in the Dominion War battles when they actually incorporated them. They were dropping like flies and were essentially useless.
@@VGamingJunkieVT a modern day tank, with all its armor, doesn't stand a chance against a bunker-buster cruise missile. The shields of a small fighter can't withstand what is basically a giant cannon phaser being shot at it.
@@osricleondegrance9244 Did shields suddenly become redundant? If so, I haven't been keeping up lately. I recall shields still being very useful for blocking shots.
@@mrlarvux et al. - to be clear, I am not saying he's the worst Trek has ever had...that would be silly. :) He was/is an egotist, but at least his overall creative vision for the show was in line with the expectations and needs of its fans.
TheLifeOnHigh Yeah, it was in the Enterprise Tech Manual, by Sternbach and Okuda. That book was used as a “bible” or reference for all sorts of stuff, some of which ended up on screen and some of which obviously didn’t. The one on the D looked reminiscent of DaVinci’s designs for a tank, but of course it was no warship. Those of us who owned that book waited out the whole series and the destruction of the D before anyone so much as mentioned there was a “captain’s yacht.”
@M. S. That made me both laugh, and cry a little inside. Man... I miss TNG... wish it had continued. But then again, they ended it in style and on a high note with one of the best endings in television history... good times.
That aeroshuttle undocking sequence is cooler than the one they used in Insurrection. I like the way the thrusters engage before it heads out. Reminds me of something out of Star Wars.
"We are not designing a hot rod, Lieutenant." "That is exactly what we're designing. A twenty fourth century, warp-powered, ultra-responsive hot rod." - Tuvok and Tom Paris, “Extreme Risk"
The problem with captains yacht is that it is externally mounted on a ship. That prevents using a whole of re-used effects shots. We have to remember the time Voyager and DS9 were made. Before CGI was a proven winner, effects on those are mix of practical effects with models and CGI, by the final seasons of shows mostly CGI, but they started with mostly practical effects. Re-using stock footage mattered even in all CGI effects shows like Babylon 5. When there is episode of Voyager where they use the captain yacht, there is a hole at bottom of saucer section, that is a potential continuity issue when it comes to effects shots.
Yeah, they probably just never bothered to use the yacht because a lot of the shuttle-based episodes needed the vehicles to be flimsy so that they could write 'stranded on an alien planet, and need rescue' episodes; they always had a couple of those every season. Ironically, flying a beefier and more resilient secondary craft would've made those stories impossible. By the time it rolled around that they wanted to have a stronger option, it would've been foolish to unpack the yacht because it had never been used before, and it probably would've confused the viewers as to why they had this stronger option the whole time and just never used it, so they made the Delta Flyer to get around that obvious and jarring reality. I mean, it would've made as much sense as all of a sudden having an original crew member appear that can lift 10 tons, use mind powers, and heal the injured and raise the dead... and he'd just been down in the Mess chopping up ingredients behind Neelix instead of being useful. Something like that, you need an episode where they find such a person and add him/her to the crew.
@Lassi Kinnunen In short, writers and directors want to leech off a big name to showcase their own vision which would never normally reach a mass audience?
If memory serves, the write-up on the aero shuttle lists it as being able to withstand heavy gravity atmosphere, which is of course the exact reason the delta flyer was built in the first place. I liked the flyer, it was a pretty neat addition to the show and lore, but if the show had money to burn why not use both? Great vid!
Thank you for this video, I’ve often wondered why the Captain’s Yacht was never used. I assumed that they kept scrounging parts off of it to fix the plethora of shuttles that they lost along the way.
Voyager was lucky to have the popular run it did. (1995-2001) It aired on UPN. Half the country couldn't even get UPN back then, ...regardless of cable package. Same for the WB. Many people still don't get the CW in high definition.
Lucky??..the show was good..luck had nothing to do with it..as for the people/viewers that couldn't "get" the show that's something all together different..
I remember soon after VOY started and I bought the Playmates toy ship and noticed the shape under the saucer section and thought to myself, "Oh, I can't wait to see them use this on the show."
I've asked myself this question about every Star Trek Show they have....they always ignore the Captain Yatchs. No one else ever mentioned it before though...lol. I like it here 😁
Also, something that was never mentioned was Voyager's secondary warp core (which is in the schematics shown on the Bridge). This was probably because it would have been used for spare parts.
Well...if the Aeroshuttle ever got destroyed there would be a huge unsightly hole on the bottom of Voyager's saucer. Then they would have to finish their journey home with a big hole where the destroyed Aeroshuttle would normally dock.
That.....is a very valid point. An unsightly hole and a prime target for enemy ships to exploit. The thing is clearly larger than the DF, so replacing it would be much more difficult than replacing the first DF, leaving said hole there in perpetuity.
Yeah. Pretty much ALL Starfleet vessels have a "Captains Yacht". The only exception to this that I know of is the Defiant Class. Because the Vessel is so small and so compactly built there is simply zero room for a Yacht. Instead the Shuttle Bay, which it does have, occupies that circular spot on Defiants underbelly, where a Captains Yacht would go.
"We can't do that. It might look too good." Jesus, with decision making like that during production it's no wonder Voyager is in the bottom half in the series' quality.
I love how the lore in star trek was so deep the 3d models had features that were never originally used. Without planning everything in sequence before filming it's inevitable that things like this will slip through. Then again the fact that fans demand continuity on this level shows their dedication to the franchise. It's a mistake that shows how amazing the show really is. I love stuff like this.
Yeah it not being finished makes zero sense. Both them building the flyer from Scratch and with the amount of damage that occured to Voyager over and over to be repaired there is no way they couldnt have finished the Arrow. If Behrman wanted a legit reason not to use it I have a good one that only took me about 5 minutes to think of. You have them finish the Arrow in season 1. They use it but its just a tiny bit underpowered to deal with the likes of the early season villians, such as the Kazon and the Vidiians. Once they get to Season 3-4 and running into the likes of the Malon, Hirogen, 8472, and of course the Borg it becomes VERY obvious that the Arrow is just way too underarmored and undergunned for what the Delta Quadrant is throwing at them, and thus they come up with the idea for the Delta Flyer. As Paris put it "A 23rd century Hot Rod.".
Well. the 'unfinished' part could be something key like 'all the warp coils didn't arrive yet. Also one thing the DElta FLyer had up on trying to finish the aeroshuttle is they could build the Flyer from the keel up in a *pressurized bay.* I think they'd have had to have a spacedock and stuff to actually finish that aeroshuttle.
I still prefer the best excuse - the Aeroshuttle was never installed on Voyager, there was just a blanking template / shield in place of where it should have been docked. It’s more logical to roll with this explanation than to suggest it was in place but construction wasn’t completed. It was supposed to be no more than a glorified Runabout for crying out loud, not a fully functional quarter scale Voyager mini me!
Voyager was a plastic model, not CGI. Once it launched they would have had a hole there and been forced to shoot new footage for continuity's sake. In those days most footage was used over and over , especially establishing shots. That's the reason that no matter how much brutal damage she took, Voyager was always physically back to normal for the next episode. And yeah it would have been a much more interesting series if the ship had evolved over the entire run to mirror their journey.
Voyager was the first to have a corresponding CGI model. in the first 3 seasons there were only a few scenes that used the CGI model, but at the end was exclusively CGI.
the Delta Flyer was an awesome shuttle...really wish it had been really, really souped up and overpowered like a mini-Defiant and have it's own cloaking device...would have been useful on more than a few missions
it didn't have a cloak, but it was often talked about as being heavily modified and pretty badass for a shuttle. That was the cool pretense of the thing. Paris was designing the Delta Flyer the way a hot rodder in the '60s would have been designing a custom Bel Air or '32 Ford, which was actually referred to in the episode Extreme Risk. It was even entered into a race. But Voyager didn't have the resources to build a borderline illegal, high end tactical vessel the way the Defiants were, so I think that kind of thing would have strained plausibility, and also, while the Defiant isn't a deep-space vessel, it was a full-fledged starship in its own right, so it's not something that you would ordinarily dock in a medium-sized ship like Voyager, even though the Defiant is smaller. The Defiant was designed to have a standard crew complement of 50, while the Intrepid class (Voyager) had a recommend complement of 160, so even if the Delta Flyer had been just half or even a third the size of the Defiant, it would have been really difficult to fit in the Voyager.
@@elenchus Well let's keep in mind, that voyager itself could have used cloaking. It's not like the federation didn't understand cloaking technology. The federation could have easily used cloaking technology. The problem wasn't that they didn't have the technology, the problem was that the federation was barred from using that technology in peace treaties. And even in TNG, the federation had something more powerful than cloaking.....phasing. Which would not just make a ship invisible, but also entirely invulnerable.
@@peoplez129 That's true, and presumably there's no reason the Delta Flyer itself couldn't use cloaking, but as you pointed out, it was illegal, and I'm not sure Voyager had it in mind to take an ultra-rare device (at least, within federation space) for its short mission. They would have had to independently re-develop cloaking technology on the ride home. From a show writing perspective, this probably was undesirable, since it would make it so there never needed to be an episode. Voyager would have just glided home silently, stopping for fuel and supplies every once in awhile, for 70 years.
I’m pretty sure the real reason is that if they used it they would need a second set of stock footage of Voyager flybys with the shuttle missing from the hull. VOY was a bit of a transitional series for the effects, and most of the flyby and static shots that were constantly recycled were of the physical model from the early first season while the new footage specific to an episode was CGI. At least the two matched better than when TNG switched to a smaller physical model, in some episodes it looked like they were two different ships!
I think a good in-universe reason for the aeroshuttle not being launched would be that, if it got destroyed, Voyager would have had a massive thin spot in the hull. Most Captain's Yacht's have basically a glorified interior bulkhead for the inside of the socket with the bottom of the yacht itself being a continuity of the saucer section hull. In the end, making the Delta Flyer is making a smaller, cheaper chip that can outperform the aero shuttle without compromising Voyager's hull.
VOG supposedly wasnever launched with one, this ship is just a “placeholder.” I think Junkball Media mentions it in his videos about the USS Voyager. It’s a fun channel btw.
They couldnt finish it? Thats the reason given? They were able to build not one but two delta flyers and thats not counting the amount of times voyager was damaged, sometimes severly, only to have it fully repaired and looking like new the next episode but they counldnt finish this one ship? The nerd in me is slightly upset at this pathetic attempt at a reason.
Great video. Been wondering about this. Even though the footage of the aero shuttle launch isn’t in the show, at least I was able to see it here. Cheers mate
I loved Star Trek Voyager, particularly in the last couple of seasons. I loved the Delta Flyer. It was for what a shuttlecraft should be. Small enough to travel where Voyager couldn't, but also versatile enough to be used for just about anything one needed.
If you look through TNG and VOY its many times where a clever use of Captains Yacht could have save the day or at least reduce the cost. Say all the times where the ship risks destruction cause of of a core breach in the main reactor or when the entire ship is under attack or control by an alien species and they need to get of the ship in order to save it. The same goes with the Enterprise Ds saucher separation capability. Its only used a couple of times despite that the whole crew might have been saved if the engine section where seperated from the saucher section. Johan.
That’s really cool, I watched voyager from it’s pilot episode at the time. Had no idea that the voyager had a rad little shuttle like that. I can see why DS9 made the defiant, this is an interesting point.
Even if they did have to cannibalize a couple of parts, what is easier, replacing some removed components and putting a few finishing touches on an existing craft, or designing and building a completely new craft from scratch?
@@Arbbal perhaps they figured considering the Borg Shielding and weapons loadout requirements, the flyer was a better bet rather than trying to retrofit a half cannibalised craft
It wasnt a shuttle it was the Captain's yacht. Nearly all Starfleet ships have them. But I do have to agree, it would have been nice to see it used. But then again, its not really used in any of the tv shows.
Insurrection was a TV movie script with a Feature Film budget, not a great film, but i'd take Insurrection over Discovery or Picard anyday! Loved the Delta Flyer, great little ship, but I very much the Aeroshuttle could have withstood the pressure of the gas giant, so even if they used the Aeroshuttle, I feel the Flyer would have been build reguardless as you said for the more dangerous missions in the DQ
I got an explanation, the shuttle isn't actually there, its construction wasn't finished before Voyager had its maiden flight (probably delayed until tuesday) and what you see on the underside is just a protective overplate to cover the hole =P
I always wondered how they end up ramming other ships in things like Nemesis and year of hell etc. while the enemy was focused on primary ship couldn’t they just program or remote control a nice disposable Type 8 shuttle (which were warp capable) to just warp into the enemy and do fall more damage than the mothership would ramming at no where near relativistic speed? Or just load one up with high yield antimatter charges n have it act as a shielded and armed remote control torpedo? Would seem far easier and consume less resources and time to make more shuttles than repair or rebuild an entire primary vessel. Though I also questioned things like why not just have something like batons at least for cqb with borg drones since the shields don’t block physical attacks. Even if it’s seen as less humane or w/e by starfleet it’s comes down to a weapon that is damn near guaranteed to work against borg no matter what without constant remodulation. Guess that’s why I can’t recall seeing a borg boarding party on a klingon ship, they tend to have sharp pointy things and no conniptions about using them.
Given their tech, I would have camped at a resource-rich planet for a while, repurposed thousands of copies of the EMH as shipyard workers, and built a Sovereign class.
Thank you for this post! I was thinking about this subject last week while watching Voyager reruns! Anything Berman has to say is null and void! To paraphrase Oppenheimer, "behold Rick Berman is the destroyer of all things Trek"! LOL! They could have used the areo shuttle as a life boat on several missions including when Seska stole Voyager. Personally I like the shuttle better than the flyer, and I agree it would have been cooler to have the crew to complete the ships construction on the fly so to speak. It also could have been a second gun on many episodes when the Voyager mother ship was outgunned and needed support like when they were trapped in the void. Great topic, please do keep up the great work!
People mostly forget the purpose of a captain's yacht. As the name gives out, it's a diplomatic luxurious space vehicle. You can't simply use it as a usual shuttle (I guess there's a rule or something about that). When did Picard use his captain's yacht? Pretty much never in the TNG series. He used it in one of the movies (Insurrection? Nemesis? One of those I guess) and for what purpose? For a diplomatic visit. While Voyager was lost in the Delta quadrant, they had fewer options of being on diplomatic missions and when they were, they either used the transporter (like every other spaceship crew before), or a shuttle (or the Delta Flayer, that was built as a special purposes shuttle). Why using the Aeroshuttle, if it's not really needed (and would leave a big hole in the bottom part of the saucer section)? One reason to really use the Aeroshuttle would be to evakuate Voyager in case of a disaster, it was surely bigger than a shuttle and would take more people, save more lives. But there was never such episode, so again, it's main purpose is diplomacy, why using a diplomatic vessel, when not needed? They had plenty of shuttles (apparently enough for each next episode) and the Delta Flayer (actually 2) on top. They didn't really need another special purpose space vehicle to use as an ordinary shuttlecraft.
I honestly think the Aeroshuttle was too fragile due to its runabout frame. The Delta Flyer is also designed for much more frugal engineering. Basically the Aeroshuttle is a 2 wheel drive road car while the Delta Flyer is a rally car.
If it was an "unused" section of the ship it could have been a cool location for many other things. Harry Kim playing music when his roomate wanted to sleep, Tom refitting it for some personal use. Or even 7 of 9 turning it into a proper sleeping quarters with borg recharging stations.
Fun fact! while the aeroshuttle was never used in the show, it was used in the mmorpg star trek online. By acquiring an advanced intrepid class you could launch the aeroshuttle from any intrepid variant. The shuttle boasted a single micro torpedo launcher but had multiple phasers that while less damaging than your main ship were much more accurate have a 25% chance per shot to take enemy systems offline entirely, while the motherhips phasers had a 2.5% per shot. As the intrepids are classified as a science type ship i got all of them as a science captain and while i flew them the aeroshuttle was a incredible support vessel in combat.
A lore-friendly explanation why they didn't finish building it is that by the time they were ready to construct a runabout, they had learned new tricks from alien tech while in the Delta Quadrant, and realized it was better to just build a new ship from the ground up. Several of the common parts probably would have been scavenged from the Aero-Shuttle, to reduce the number of replicated parts. If they needed two runabouts it would make more sense to convert the now-gutted Aero-Shuttle into a secondary shuttle bay, to contain a second Delta Flyer. But they never had a need for two runabouts at the same time, so it remained incomplete, probably used for storage.
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Insurrection, but I must admit I never actually paid enough attention to that launch sequence to even notice it was the Captain’s Yacht they were using to help the Baku. They actually had quite a nice variety of new shuttles in that movie.
Another reason it might not have been used as a shuttle is because when it is launched the structural Integrity Fields have to be adjusted because there's nothing in its bay anymore. if it were to be destroyed they would have to permanently adjust the structural Integrity fields which is not ideal to the overall original shape when the aero shuttle is docked.
Not to mention it's really a piss poor lore reason. What is easier, putting a few finishing touches on an existing craft, or designing and building a completely new craft from scratch?
Hi there lets be honest here every old school Star Trek series and movies from the Original series to TNG and even as you say Voyager and even Enterprise to be honest are better then the shithole that is DIscovery and even the JJ Abrams Star Trek films and maybe even better then all of the new Star Trek stuff for that matter.
Maybe the new design for the Delta flyer rendered obsolete the captain's yacht design, it was an outstanding vessel really fit for the many problems they found. But I agree with some of the comments, the Delta flyer sounded better for the story line and they just forgot about it.
The aeroshuttle makes a lot of sense to me, since Voyager is designed for atmospheric reentry, the aeroshuttle looks like it could function quite easily in atmosphere, since it looks more like a conventional aircraft rather than a typical Starfleet shuttle. Voyager had so much potential, but they had to play it safe. What might it have been if they'd taken more risks, like the aborted Year of Hell season I wonder.
My Head-Canon always was: There was no actual shuttle. It was just a simple space frame, acting as a placeholder, because the "real thing" was not yet scheduled to be installed before Voyager's badlands mission. Interesting to hear that this is by now more or less canon, as you mentioned at the end of the video. The difference being "not completely finished" versus my "unusable dummy / space frame". The latter is an even stronger reason for it to not being used at all and instead building the Deltaflyer from scratch. We could also argue that the unfinished aero shuttle was so ugly and generally bad in Tom Paris' eyes that he never even bothered to finish it, and designed the Deltaflyer, which he liked much better.
What I don't understand is why they didnt work on the slipstream dive more. Sure it failed but they could have at least tried to solve the issues with it.
B'Elanna Torres is a descendant of the Klingon engineer who decided to throw away the plans for weapons that can fire while cloaked immediately after General Chang's ship was destroyed.
I hadn't known about the "Captain's Yacht" in any of the ships (I've only watched Insurrection once, when it first came out, so I don't remember much of it... nor care, as I didn't like the movie much either), so this is all new knowledge to me. However, the way I'm thinking about it, the Voyager crew likely didn't use it because it would have been about as useful as a normal shuttle craft. That being the case, you could also say that because it was only part-finished by the time of the Badlands mission, the crew deemed finishing it as an unnecessary waste of resources after being trapped in the Delta Quadrant, since it would fare no better against Kazon ships and the like than a regular shuttle would. Alternately, if it WAS completed, during their first few battles with the Kazon after destroying the Caretaker's Array, they could have stripped it for parts to help rebuild Voyager. Regardless, by the time season 5 came about, the crew had been through so much and were much better off resource-wise, but knew they'd need a more battle-worthy fighter-shuttle to help fight off the likes of the Borg and other enemies... and with Tom's enthusiasm for building vehicles, it likely seemed like a good time to get one underway, only for the design to be improved upon during season 7.
We didn’t have that crap when I commanded the Lexington. Half our captains actually forgot that we had shuttle crafts anymore period. Funny story that fits as an example was the Constellation’s encounter with the Doomsday Machine. For a brief period captains started using that transporter for so much that they even started using it to evacuate crews onto class M worlds. However in this case, it was a horrible call since the planet he beamed his crew to was in the doomsday machines path. Had he remembered the shuttle crafts and escape pods, he could have safely evacuated most his crew that way and probably lived on. I’m guessing over time, the same thing happened to Voyager. The crew probably forgot the ship was even there and ended up building a new ship for the sake of not wanting to tamper with a ship that was already designed and unfinished, plus there is the launch sequence too. Maybe they wanted a smaller shuttle that could do the exact same thing. Too bad Tuvok didn’t like the sports edition look that Mr. Paris wanted to go with.
The obvious answer is that Brannon Braga either didn’t know it was there or forgot about it. He never could be bothered to keep up with continuity, either that of the entire Trek continuity or just the stuff he himself had written. Go look at a interview he did a year or so after leaving ENT. He’s being interviewed on the set of his new CBS show Threshold. He’s talking about his Trek days and he can’t remember what a Tricorder does. Seriously. A man worked on Trek for 15 years should have at least picked that one up by osmosis. Could it be brain lock? Sure. It could also be the tell tale signs of a guy that just doesn’t give a crap about the details or Trek and was just there for a steady check. Kinda like Kurtzman...So, we got an endless supply of shuttles and the Delta Flyer and the Delta Flyer II cause it was KEWL! Remind me why we got KlingOrcs in Discovery? Oh yeah, cause it was KEWL. Two apples from the same tree.
A possible reason that the crew would not have used the Aerohuttle, would be that they cannibalized much of it to repair some of Voyager's damage taken early in the series. This, combined with the probability that it was never finished could have left the hole that the Delta Flyer eventually filled.
My own interpretation was that shuttle was the last resort ship or the luxury escape pod for the captain in case Janeway needed to destroy or crash or escape from Voyager in no hope situation, being herself the last crewmember to escape the ship.
