The answer is obvious. Tom Paris made all the shuttle craft in his spare time, between his two jobs, multiple hobbies, inventing warp 10 and his committed relationship.
They actually used 123, adding the deficit of 85 they were left with to the 38 they started the series with. And they didn’t even fire all of those! At one point, they converted a bunch of them into biomolecular torpedoes that they never used!
right now at this moment in time defence companies are drawing up drones with onboard 3d printers that will print different size missiles/bombs during missions. Suffice to say Voyagers replicators easily let her do the same, all she needs are materials to make the warheads which it may even be able to replicate.
I HAVE AN ANSWER! The reason they have seemingly infinite shuttles is because nothing is real, this is all just a holodeck recreation being watched by Riker.
Something I find really funny is that DS9 did an objectively better job with this sort of attention to detail with runabouts even though they had way less of a reason to; they keep the names of the runabouts currently at the station consistent, they always get exactly one new runabout every time one is destroyed, and there's exactly one (Rio Grande) that survives for the entire run of the show as sort of a background easter egg which is never mentioned at all by the characters.
Re-warching this older video and you joke about how Voyager should just chuck shuttles at the Borg, and I suddenly remembered they did EXACTLY THIS in the episode Dark Frontier where the queen makes that offer to spare voyager if seven returns. They literally throw a shuttle to the borg to have them assimilate it for no other reason than to DISTRACT THEM!!!
The problem with the shuttlecraft isn't the shuttlecraft, its that it was symptomatic of how the series was written; they didn't really want to be lost in space, they just wanted to have unlimited license to create new alien empires and to show lots and lots of borg.
Hear me out. What if the whole reason they're on replicator rations isn't because they're far from home, but because they're using so much power replicating parts for all the shuttlecraft that they keep losing?
What your looking for is Ronald D. Moore. The producer that was on Star Trek and then went on to make Battlestar Galactica. Voyager was supposed to be gritty, a ship on the edge of the universe. It was how a Federation ship would survive while dealing with rations and being constantly under attack and a crew that is just barely keeping it's self together. That was the original premise that got greenlit. But as they ramped up production all that grittiness got taken away. Much of that idea, Ronald D. Moore went on to make Battlestar Galactica with.
The industrial replicator responsible for manufacturing shuttlecraft malfunctioned when they arrived in the Delta Quadrant and won't stop making shuttles. The crew of Voyager HAS to "lose" a few shuttlecraft every year to keep from overloading the shuttlebay.
They have industrial replicators on board. They established that when building the Delta Flyer. They did a lot of "We stopped at this planet to get stuff." episodes to justify having resources.
Probably had them dismantled in storage boxes. Want a new shuttlecraft? Bring out another IKEA box and assemble one. Imagine how many leftover allen wrenches they have cluttering up the place.
Fun fact: Voyager could have made it back to the alpha quadrant in about 3 weeks if they didn't have thousands of shuttles weighing them down. Janeway was trying to offload them for weight reduction
I do love Voyager, just got me the DVD box and have by now nearly finished season 2. What bothers me more than the number of shuttles is the fact that they just leave the crashed shuttles behind. They make a big deal out of NOT sharing starfleet technology with other species - but just abandon warp-capable, technology-packed little spaceships on random planets and asteroids...
That's a really good point. Sometimes you see them destroy the shuttles, but I guess sometimes they don't. What bothers me is sometimes the shuttles seem to have warp capability, and sometimes they don't.
My problem with Voyager was that the ship always looked new. Even in the pilot when they get taken to the Delta Quadrant they sustain a lot of damage and loss of life. Yet by the end of the episode everything is pristine. They also have enough surplus energy they can use a holodeck. They have limited resources and made all kinds of modifications to the ship yet its back looking new the following episode.
Fun fact. There was no room for crew quarters on the ship, due to all the shuttles, so everyone just had their own shuttle craft to sleep in. Every time a shuttle is lost that's someones losing their room with all their stuff in it, and they shed a tear over the thought of all the sleeping on floors they shall be doing in the long years a head. :(
That's actually a really good point... When I think about it, Voyager loses far more shuttles than DS9 loses runabouts, and in DS9 they even make a big deal about having to replace runabouts - "I'm glad Earth has so many rivers"
You can replicate spacecraft and other vehicles piece by piece using replicators, kind of like putting together Ikea furniture. We saw Sisko do that with his light ship replica....the problem with that is that the Voyager crew are always complaining about their replicator rations being low, and I strongly doubt replicating the alloys and rare earth minerals required for a shuttle is any less resource intense than making a bunch of rice and beans to feed the crew.
This reminds me. One of the little things I love about BSG is that any time stuff gets blown up by the Cylons or rogue elements inside the fleet, in the next episode's opening credits the number of humans counted in the fleet goes down.
To really drive home the idea that they had no supply lines and were running low on materials, the ship and its equipment could have degraded as time went by. Security personnel would end up using alien weapons as phasers were lost or broke. One of the ship's nacelles might be blown off and replaced with a mismatched one. Its easier to adapt alien spare parts, than to waste resources replicating an exact Starfleet component. By the time they got home, the ship's hull would look like patchwork of scavenged parts. They did have alien food in the canteen, though.
That would have been great. I feel like, especially in the era of Voyager, TV show producers had this rule they had to impose on the creators of the show. It's like the show still had have a high degree of continuity, even if the viewer randomly shuffled the episodes and watched them out of order. Only small details were allowed to be changed - even in the course of the whole series. Things like love interests could change, minor characters could go away or new could come along (especially in an ensemble cast situation like Star Trek). But the major details had to remain instantly recognizable. Probably in hopes that 20 years later the show would still be running in syndication and airing order might be disregarded. Or maybe that some syndication deals might not involve the whole series, only the best 100 episodes or something like that. Even if that never happened, it feels like the big wigs behind production planned for that eventuality and the result was all these problems mentioned in the video and in this comment section.
Here is the thing. Shows from the early 2000s and before were not written expecting people to bing watch these over and over again discussing on all of these little plot holes and continuity errors.
I have to say the Equinox was a more accurate portrayal of a ship stuck in the Delta quadrant than Voyager was. Yeah, we all hope we’d maintain our morality but, seriously?
Obviously the reason they are still eating Neelix's cooking 7 years into the show: all their energy is going into replicating shuttlecraft parts. I can see Janeway now on loosing another shuttle, "Great, there's another 4 months of eating Neelix's 'food'".
Same idea. Plus they prioritize on shuttlecraft fabrication so much that they fall drastically-short on torpedo-production. Which is odd, since shelled-out torpedoes are used for coffins... For some missions it'd have been cheaper to just load the away-team into a torpedo, or retrofit a torpedo to test a warp-drive for one.
Think about this: As many times as Voyager was boarded, hijacked, or basically left almost completely un-space-worthy, they somehow managed to repair it to "new" status by the next episode. I'd say that's even more monumental than continuously replacing shuttles.
Yeah, this. They have to ration replicator power for food, BUT they can run the holodeck non-stop, keep all the lights at 100% even in sections they're not using, create unlimited replacement shuttles and they never, EVER run out of PAINT for the outer hull. What poor schlub has to go out there with the brush and repaint the numbers after every battle? Oh wait. Lister.
I know why their food and clothing replicator use was rationed: Because they needed extra energy for their shuttlecraft replicator. Right? :) I love the Delta Flyer and I totally get why Tom Paris would want to build it, but its appearance was the moment I stopped taking Voyager seriously as a show. In terms of the show's premise, they couldn't have handled it worse.
Same reason Voyager gets reset to tip top condition at the beginning of each episode - Industrial replicators, which can create parts needed to repair Voyager, in addition to shuttle parts that can be assembled into a new shuttle each time one is needed (albeit, at a far greater cost than photo torpedoes). It's perfectly normal for a long term scientific/exploration ship to have one aboard, in case they're too far from a base to replenish parts and equipment.
The infinite shuttle craft doesn't bother me so much as Tom's insistence on putting in those nonsense Captain Proton joysticks instead a standard federation control console designed by actual engineers and with a proven track record in the field because suddenly Tom's some kind of 24th century hipster now for some reason.
Actually I'm surprised how much shuttles were used at all, compared to TNG. They're in a hostile area of space with no allies and yet the command staff are routinely taking them out, by themselves, on extended missions out of com range. Where are they going? And are there any instances where the shuttles aren't attacked, sucked into a anomaly and are ultimately lost? Why didn't they learn?
Damn good point, sorry to say I over-looked it. It isn't even narrative consistent to send command staff away from the ship! Yet it is done all the time, often becoming an example of why they shouldn't....
@3:20 ish.. This is exactly what Ronald D Moore wanted and why he was forced out in the end because he kept pushing for crew and the ship to have consequences for things happening over the course of the series with the end goal of Voyager looking beat to hell. Well he did get his wish in a way.... He got to make BSG.
The problem wit this issue is that the answer is easy, but the writers were too lazy to do it. Building the Delta Flyer shows that they could in fact build shuttlecraft. So it makes sense that they could be building new shuttles. They just needed one episode where they mention, 'crap we have to build a new shuttlecraft'. Or have a shuttle blow up and someone laments, 'there goes all our replicator rations for a month.'
I recently saw an article saying that nerding out was encouraged in DS9 writers rooms, while it was frowned upon in Voyager's writers rooms. I think a lot of voyagers' issues come back to this. The writers weren't discussing implications for the future of the story, nor were they discussing the history that they'd written. It's a real shame because voyager really needed a somewhat more serialized structure, and much more attention given to the limitations of its isolated ship format.
I think the bigger question to this question isn't how do they have so many shuttlecraft, but why are the damaged ones left behind. It has been mentioned multiple times through out the show, and mainly by Captain Janeway herself is the the federation does not share technology. Other characters through out the Star Trek universe has said it, but none more so than the crew of Voyager. All the Kazon that are following Voyager need to do is recover one of the discarded shuttlecraft and they have access to tons of new more powerful tech than they have ever had and become one of the most powerful forces in their section of the quadrant.
You could make the same criticism about personnel losses. They've suffered a number of casualties, yet they seem to still have a full complement. There's no mention of having to adjust the duty rosters, no double shifts or having to learn new roles to cover the staffing gaps, and they still seem to have an abundance of free time for holodecking and attending parties and such.
Voyager could have been better if it had a more BSG vibe, dent the ship add to the ship. In other words what returned home should have been a bastardize borg cube, mixed with Malon, Voth and other species ship bits. Also more weapons and tech, if you remember the episode where Seven thinks she was attacked by the weapons sales man, well we should see the ship with the weapon they bought. The year of hell stuff could have played out more often. In order to save on power the crew couldn't order food from the replicators in their quaters, they had to go see Nelix and get what ever he was doing that day, but they could power Fair Haven and build what ever they wanted ?
That particular issue was addressed in episode about Eqinox, another smaller Starfleet ship also lost in Delta Quadrant. It's Capt. Ransom, got so desperate that started drain lifeforms and using their life energy has fuel boost power to ships engines.
An even bigger part of this is the complete lack of any battle scars on Voyager itself after countless battles that they barely escaped from over the years. The damage control crews really must have had their hands full meticulously replacing every piece of hull plating each time they got shot so the ship looked like it was fresh out of spacedock even rolling into the series finale. If they can give Voyager a complete overhaul after every battle without any new equipment or supplies, replicating a few dozen replacement shuttlercraft must be a piece of cake
I think the reason the infinite shuttles bothers you is that it’s indicative of how poorly thought out Voyager was. It’s tied into to your big gripe that Voyager was OBSESSED with its status quo. Nothing was allowed to change from episode to episode; there could be no long-term consequences, not even anything as small as “Guys, we’re out of shuttles.” To me, Voyager just seems like it was a mess of a series. But not even in the fun way like Enterprise was. Voyager was just dull.
It could have been great if they stuck to the premise - that they were on their own with limited supplies. There was so much story to be had from them actually having to make and scrape and get creative with what they had. The status quo should have been fixing that ship with duct tape and bubble gum, avoiding damages, tracking resources, finding more. It could have been interesting seeing them work around their supposed difficulties.
There are some things you just can't un-see. When a video I watched pointed out that Captain Picard has a crystal on his ready room desk, and he is constantly fondeling it... I lost my mind because through my million viewings, I never noticed it ONCE! Now there is this...
To everyone saying “replicators” as the beginning and ending of their rebuttal, explain to me why they have unlimited power and resources to replicate shuttles, but Neelix needs to grow and cook food for the crew because they can’t replicate enough to feed everyone? Heck, DS9 went through a fair number of Runabouts, not as many as Voyager did shuttles, on a mining station with dedicated refineries and even mentioned large scale replicators being needed for large items, and they still needed to have Starfleet deliver new Runabouts to the station as replacements. They literally mention receiving replacements, as well as the Captain naming them. So why does a space station, that dwarfs the Voyager and was built to be a refinery, need Starfleet to replace what is admittedly a larger and more complex craft than a shuttle, but an experimental long range spacecraft with limited resources and energy does not?
Three words: conservation of resources. Besides, one of those resources is time. Time spent by a replicator replicating leola root pilaf, latara broth, or Talaxian omelette, cannot at the same time be spent by the same replicator in replicating warp coils, photon torpedo parts, RCS thrusters, thrust nozzles, sensor parts, etc. No doubt everyone enjoys their Bajoran Kava juice, their Jiballian fudge cake, and their Banean Rolk, and does not like missing their yummy Klingon Heart of targ - but there are more important things even than Janeway’s morning coffee. So Neelix makes the arrangements for providing the food, leaving the replicators free to be used for replicating parts and elements for shuttles and photon torpedoes.
One aspect that gets over looked is the amount of people that are lost and as far as we know not replaced. The only replacements or new crew are Neelix, Kes, seven of nine, and the borg children. The only ones to stay till the end are Neelix, seven of nine and the older borg child. They wouldn't need to kill off or replace the bridge crew, but it would have been better had they shown different aliens starting to slowly replace the crew. These could easily been explained as refugees that decided to come along to outcast of their societies that the voyager crew decided to give asylum.
Type 9 Shuttlecraft are literally the first near fully modular shuttle in the fleet, with basically 90% of the ship being able to be fabricated on board the vessel of choice. Seeing how voyager mined and traded with almost every species and system they went through, I can see them NEVER running out of shuttles as long as the ship can find a source of materials.
There's a few things like that that bother me. The big one is why on Earth is Voyager able to land on planets? Who thought it was worthwhile to install landing gear in a giant spaceship that by all accounts shouldn't have any reason to ever land? The other thing is the replicator rations. If replicator is rationed, how is it that whenever Janeway orders soup, the soup comes with a bowl? Why not reuse a bowl you already have? Surely it takes way more energy to make the bowl than the soup!
It adds energy. That's true. And her fsvorite cup... what? We never see her put it into the replicator but she always take that cup out having ordered coffee. How can that cup be "the" favorite cup. And besides when it's ruined she can always just replicate a new one!!
Anyone remember the Voyager plot point that had the ship only 38 Torpedo's with "no way to replace them?" then ended up using close to 100 during the shows 7 season run.
You answered your own question. They can replicate all the shuttle craft parts they need to build new ones. They are stuck in the Delta Quadrant, what else are they going to do with their time? They just don't have any episodes on it because Star Trek - Mechanics isn't exciting enough. Photon torpedoes apparently have some components that can't be replicated, (yea, that's a thing in the Star Trek universe) so they make trades with other civilizations to restock. Star Trek - Commerce would also not make very exciting episodes.
To me, this was the entire problem with Voyager in a nutshell. Instead of embracing the show's premise of an isolated ship with limited resources, they just wrote the show the same way they did TNG which relied heavily on the trope of constantly rotating equipment and personnel to explain why things show up in one episode despite never being seen or referenced before or after. I get that Star Trek (at least back then and excepting DS9) relied on the old school entirely episodic approach to television, but that format just doesn't really work with Voyager's premise.
To quote Memory Alpha: "Located on deck 10, in the aft dorsal portion of the secondary hull, shuttlebay 1 was the primary port for entrance and egress for auxiliary craft and shuttles. Shuttlebay 1 was a large L-shaped room. (VOY: "Alice", "Q2") Behind the main shuttlebay was an even larger hangar, known as shuttlebay 2, where the construction, repair and maintenance of auxiliary craft was performed. Shuttlebay 2 could also be depressurized and spacecraft could be launched from there. (VOY: "Threshold", "Extreme Risk", "In the Flesh")" The ship was designed to have facilities to construct and repair shuttlecraft.
They mention conserving torpedoes but they blow through their entire quoted stock several times. I don't have a problem with the idea of them replicating more of them, and even shuttlecraft hulls etc, but where's the antimatter and Dilithium coming from to power these things? I'm pretty sure they can't replicate either of those for some odd in-universe reason.
I mean, not that they don't violate physics as we currently understand it pretty routinely, but if they're using dilithium as a power source, you'd be getting free energy (and therefore in principle infinite energy) if they could replicate the fuel for less energy cost than the replicated fuel can itself generate. So that doesn't seem very odd at all: The reason would be "you can't magic energy out of nothing; you'd have to burn (or whatever) more dilithium in the process of creating it than you'd get out, because whatever energy it stores had to come from somewhere"
Also, I just remembered... they apparently had plenty of room to haul Neelix's ship around for seven fucking years. Surely they would have cannibalized that POS like in the first or second season. Or at the very least during "The Year of Hell" for materials.
It's really quite simple. They build the delta flyer so clearly the engineers on board have the skills and the knowledge to build a simple shuttlecraft, or should I say rebuild.
I never understood why this was a question. They have a crew of 150, roughly 100 of which we barely see, as well as replicators. I assume Janeway had those extra yellowshirts hard at work building shuttles and torpedos on a regular basis.
What's even worse is that in the episode _Alice,_ Chakotay says "we've already got a full complement of shuttles, not to mention the Delta Flyer". HUH? A FULL complement? You've lost like 20 of them by this point.
They should have made it so during the progress of all the seasons of Voyager, the ship became more of a Frankenstein vessel. Whereby they had to salvage ship parts and armor from alien craft they found / had help from. So when they do return to the Federation, the ship is totally unrecognizable to Starfleet.
I was just assuming they were replicating new shuttles. I mean these aren't advanced craft, they're SHUTTLES. They have like what, warp 2 capacity? I like to think that a micromanager like Janeway would be able to say "Crew- starting today everyone will take mandatory flight lessons from Tom because you keep screwing up with my shuttle reserves!" if there was a real problem. But what I do want to know is where does that extra dilithium come from if the shuttles are all warp capable... Hmmmmmm.......
Voyager couldve been phantastic. If Voyager were continously run down, all resources depleted, the crew just short of eating each other... yet they try and try to remain Starfleet. THAT'd been dope.
I do like this criticism. You're right it's a small thing, but it's emblematic of larger issues with the series that you've mentioned elsewhere. Focusing on it sort of highlights the criticism in an easy to comprehend way, the obsession with returning to the status quo after every episode is easier to understand when you put forward a clear example like this one. The problem is all the more frustrating because it serves as an example of how much more interesting things could have been if they'd run with it instead of handwaved it. It would've been nice for them to buy some local shuttles, take a couple of Maquis shuttles and/or seize some small craft from rivals. It would have made the show a little more visually interesting if they weren't always flying Star Fleet shuttles and shown them as part of a larger social ecology in the Delta Quadran, albeit a transitory one moving through.
Voyager was designed as a research ship so it would have had way more shuttles, larger hanger bay, more labs and science stations than some other type of ship of its size. It was made to do exactly what it ended up doing, explore new regions and be more self-reliant than the average ship.
well...the reason why the replicator rations were so limited was that the crew was replicating shuttle craft EVERY OTHER episode. LOL oh...and the replicated torpedos too! SO NO FOOD FOR YOU!
yes it should bother you. the shuttles, the torpedoes, THE DRASTIC CHANGE IN SHUTTLE AND PHASER DESIGN, the spotless ship, the unlimited power for holodecks, the maquis becoming starfleet with no friction whatsoever, the inconsistent crew complement with no fixed characters even though they are stuck with each other, noone resenting janewas for destroying the array, she and chakotay becoming best buds almost immediately... the list goes on.
@roman c well, they did have a little bit of trouble with the maquis joining the ship, changes in phaser and shuttle design could be upgrading it, crew compliment could be them having crew members leave and new ones coming. Senior officers, plus seven, neelix, vorik, cuhayey (bad spelling) and maybe a few others are constant, mentioned a few times.
Voyager is an Intrepid class ship -- a long range science vessel. An exploration design meant to encounter Enterprise+ levels of strangeness, with little to no support; manufacturing tailored equipment is in its mandate. Essentially, Voyager is in the ideal Federation ship category to get stranded alone in another part of the galaxy. BSG type problems happened to the Nova class Equinox -- a short range planetary science vessel. Story-wise, Startrek has always been about the Post Scarcity setting. But yeah, they left a lot of opportunities for compelling plot hooks and narrative framing devices on the table. Stargate: Universe pulled it off for a few episodes until they lost faith in their audience and decided to be like everyone else. Oddly, think SG-1 s10e20: Unending is really what VOY was going for.
It probably bugs you because, out of all the things Voyager should supposedly not have an unlimited supply of, the ubiquitous, seemingly-infinite Star Trek shuttles that ships closer to home have kind of code for and symbolize especially strongly the sheer amount of technology and resources the post-scarcity Federation society has. They have _disposable warp-capable spaceships._ And somehow, Voyager, which is supposed to be as far from Federation society as you should be able to get short of galaxy-hopping, has them... too. It is bizarre.
It is ridiculous. I don't think the writers did a good enough job of having us feel there's any kind of scarcity situation. Apart from the odd mention of getting low on torpedoes or gel packs, people are still replicating frivolous crap, and using the holodeck despite mentioning the need to conserve energy. It would have been really cool if they hammered home the resource scarcity a bit more and made it apparent. It's kind of like people who go "camping" but their car is right there and they have electrical power.
Not trying to defend the show, because I hate Voyager, but maybe the reason they had to ration the replicator usage is because they had to devote so much energy to replicating shuttle parts to build new shuttles?
they build them. same with photon torpedoes. they freaking have matter replicators and people think they cant build new photon torpedoes or shuttlecraft? they literally design and build the delta flyer in a few days... in the first few episodes the conflict is because they dont have access to starfleet supply lines and voyager is not equipped to resupply itself from raw materials. its a little glossed over, but its made clear that they make the necessary modifications to make voyager self-sufficient, and one of their major reasons for away missions is to gather raw materials.... I think the "plot hole" only exists because people weren't paying enough attention to the show
Chakotay: We have a compliment of 38 photon torpedos Janeway: And no way to replace them after they’re gone Is Janeway such a terrible Captain that she doesn’t know that Voyager has the capability to be modified to gather raw materials for all their needs? Or is it just a plot hole?
I started thinking that way but then if you can replicate a shuttle or torpedo or whatever else then why is replicating food so hard? "so on that last mission we lost a shuttle, will probably take two weeks to replicate and assemble a new one". - ok fine but the energy required to make a shuttle has to be the equivalent of a huge amount of food... anyway... "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes And other science facts Then repeat to yourself "It's just a show I should really just relax"
@@placeholdername3887 That's my head-cannon. It would have been a simple thing for the writers to write a line for Neelix procuring a small amount of antimatter in one of his negotiations and saying something like "enough for 3 photon torpedoes" to explain why they fired off more than 38 during the 7-season run. It would also allow them to have the supply of torpedoes on hand to be limited in some episodes to increase tension in the plot but allow the supply to be replenished several episodes later.
Here's the thing. The replicators on the ship can definitely replicate parts, which can be used to assemble shuttles. I assume shuttles are a very simple craft to build. They're probably designed to be simple, easy to replicate the parts and assemble. The problem here...is Voyager. They're supposed to be stranded and have to conserve power/supplies, and replicators take a lot of both power and bulk matter to transform. (Replicators do NOT create things out of energy, they work by transforming storage of bulk matter, which is stored in an efficient form.) This has to be replenished too, either by trade, or by using the replicator to break down other objects that are no longer needed. And that doesn't even get into the energy requirements. If Janeway can't even replicate her coffee because of power limitations, then they sure as hell aren't replicating shuttle parts. It'd make sense for Voyager (and all Federation ships really) to have a stock of spare ready-to-assemble shuttles (the number varying by the size of the ship), I could see the parts being stored in racks in a cargo bay or something. But Voyager is not a large ship, and it certainly doesn't have enough space to store enough parts to build 17 shuttles. I could see a couple, maybe 2-3, but no more.
Thing about replicators: most “official technical manuals” say replicators require “raw stock” in order to function. For foodstuffs, that means converting vegetable matter (for example, grasses from uninhabited planets) to a more “digestible” form; for industrial parts (such as parts for assembling shuttles) that means any form of matter - say, bits from a drifting asteroid. Replicators do use an high degree of energy, which is why replicator use is rationed, but Voyager certainly would put out enough energy to replace a shuttle / Flyer after a month.
Replicators. I could stop at that, but I feel like rambling. The problem isn't bad writing of a struggle to survive, it's limited exposition of exactly what post-scarcity remote exploration is like. Playing it safe with replicator rations in early seasons was probably overkill, and I imagine it was just there to hint that things aren't running as perfectly smoothly as they might, but they're really not that bad. Nobody's starving, nobody's having a horrible time, they're just being cautious with the luxuries, so that important things (like shuttle replacements) aren't impeded in stupidly avoidable ways. It would be much more jarring and unbelievable writing if they expected us to believe that Voyager was soooo bad off, compared with the Enterprise-D standard, just because they couldn't immediately run to starbase every time things went a little sour. Starfleet is supposed to be supremely competent, especially at keeping starships trekking. Consider that every time Enterprise-D loses a shuttle, we never once see them rushing home to starbase to pick up replacements, nor do we ever see replacements being delivered to them. Considering all the weird and wonderful ways they futz with the deflector dish and repair major structural damage weekly, it's no stretch of imagination at all to suggest that they could be routinely fabricating partial or whole shuttlecraft on their own. And from a writing point of view, that leaves "going back to stardock" as a major, surprising event, worthy of holding the audience's attention. They don't have to waste our time with petty logistics, because to both the writers and the characters, spare shuttles are a trivial thing. Data designs and builds an entire daughter-droid from scratch, mostly on his own, and that's definitely a much bigger engineering challenge than following a standard, ready-made shuttle blueprint. But simply getting the parts for Lal? That's obviously no challenge at all, and the writers waste none of our time explaining how and when Data did his basic shopping. Looking at a real-world sea ships analogy, we're actually in a weird stage of boat construction today. 300 years ago, if the crew of a big sailing ship needed a little row boat, they most likely carried all the tools and skills needed to make that happen. They might have to stop for extra wood, but maybe they even had enough spare timber that they could make their own row boat while on the move, if needed. And with replicators and Starfleet training, it's easy to imagine a starship crew 300 years from now could also just assemble their own little shuttles (plus any and all machinery needed for that), perhaps more easily than the manual woodworking of the past. It's just today that we're in a funny in-between stage, when modern ship crews almost certainly lack the tools and expertise to build their own metal or fibre glass boat, or rubber dingy. I doubt many of them even have the carpentry needed to make an old-fashioned wooden boat. And we post-industrial, pre-replicator humans think that's normal, that things can only be made in a factory by specialists far away. We, as an audience, don't typically think to be self-sufficient, except as an act of desperation. But that attitude wouldn't make sense for Starfleet crews, even if they didn't have replicators to make it a million times easier. If VOY is flawed for not correcting our perceptions about this more forcefully, then so is all of Trek. But I think, taken as a whole franchise, they _do_ give a clear enough impression, and VOY came late enough in the franchise that it could take a few things for granted, without having to restate them explicitly.
Remember when they found a old truck floating in space and when they tried to start it it started first time. The battery was not flat after years floating in space.
I'm tired of this argument. Voyager didn't start with a deuterium refinery, but we were told they built one. They didn't have a dilithium cracking station, but they mentioned building one. They built an air-ponics bay. They built an astrometrics lab. They did major maintenance work that they said would normally need a starbase facility, but they improvised a way to make it work. We watched them build the Delta Flyer from scratch. Why is it so hard believe that they could build more shuttles or torpedoes? Okay, it was never explicitly stated that they did, but I never felt that they needed to. It seemed pretty obvious to me.
They make replacement shuttles as they go. There always on the look out for resources and I'm sure they don't give all there resource collection screen time. So raw materials and fabrication replicators and there you go. More shuttles.
Kind of hard to believe they had the energy to create endless shuttles when they're all on replicator rations, the future's equivalent to food stamps. Because a little locket requires two weeks of rations, it stands to reason that constantly replicating super complex shuttle parts would be unreasonable, due to the energy constraints the writers put in place. "Because some objects needed more energy to replicate than others, a replicator ration was not simply equal to one use of the replicator. Instead, a replicator ration was equal to a certain amount of energy used by the replicator for producing the requested object. For example a clarinet, a complicated object to replicate, required a week's worth of rations as opposed to one ration to use the replicator one time. (VOY: "Parturition") Tom Paris' present for Kes, a locket, required two week's worth of rations. (VOY: "Twisted")" memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Replicator_ration There really is no logical explanation for all the shuttles. The writers just derped on this one.
@@Fermion. The whole "energy shortage" is completely insane. It's an obvious plot device and nothing else. All their replicators double as "matter-energy converters". When they put their dishes into the replicator where do they go? Into energy, E=MC^2. So they keep on going through these massive asteroid fields with shat-tons of asteroids larger than the ship itself, they frequently run into debris fields of ships and such which have been blown up. They regularly stop at junk yards to find that "specific part", but *all* of that matter could easily and readily be converted into energy with the push of a button. Imagine how many shuttle-craft and photon torpedoes one could replicate with just one asteroid field that contains 10,000,000,000x the mass of Voyager. Hell, you could replicate entire new starships for remote-control, replicate larger replicators and drones to go out and farm more energy off the random junk littering the place. Or hey, just park the damn ship in a nebula open the Bussard Collectors while the ship coasts through and consumes virtually unlimited matter for unlimited energy.
I always assumed that. Yet, pretty much every other show has established that shuttles aren't easy or cheap to make. Even if they had a formula 1 crew standing by to put those shuttles together, there's wear and tear on replicators (they do break down, as shown on other shows), as well as energy that could have been used for other purposes. I don't think the shuttles had to be nigh irreplaceable, but it would have been nice if they pretended a little. Even if just to mention that they can't get replicator rations that week, because they lost yet another shuttle.
Even the original Battlestar Galactica series mentions having replicators onboard to replenish Vipers that are lost. It's how they made the daggit for Boxie.
I remember watching the show as a kid when they said they had a limited amount of photon torpedo's feeling a sense of suspense. They definitely should have pushed the limited resources angle more.
I always assumed that they replicated parts to build new shuttles but they needed energy and matter for replications so they had to ration things for long term energy and material security.
I agree with this sentiment. There was a two part episode, I think it was called The Year of Hell. Where they were involved with a ship who's captain kept trying to alter time to save his family. Chakotay had replicated a watch for Janeway's birthday. He comments that it was done prior to the conflict. She says she can't take it because it's a meal or a hypospray. This sense of not having anything. Of struggling to maintain the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation in the face of no resources, conflict and hardship should have been what Voyager was about. They touched on it with the other Starfleet ship that turned to piracy. However, Voyager always seemed to have enough of everything. This was the wrong play to use.
That's actually why I loved the episode "The Void" as much as I did. It is easily one of the best if not the best episode of Voyager, when they were trapped in a tiny pocket universe with barely any resources whatsoever, scrounging for leftovers, fending off pirates and forming new alliances. It was terrific. And had exactly the kind of desperate survival and prevailing of Federation values under hardship theme that Voyager should have had during its entire course. Voyager is disappointing not just because of inconsistent and lazy writing, but mostly because it could have done so much more with its premises. There are glimpses here and there, where they seem to strike gold more by accident than anything else, but they mostly snap back into their comfort zone of being a generic Trek series. Which is not bad at all (especially compared to what calls itself Star Trek nowadays), but it could have been so much more.
Why would a mid range vessel need a workshop of that scale when they just hop home? A galaxy class is a fleet operations craft. It needs anything it can get to support a fleet. The intrepid was a mid-range explorer. Granted it was top of the line.
Arguably, it was part of the stereotype of rich people having an outfit for every eventuality. You see a lot of that in 90s TV at any rate, where someone packs way too many bags and then goes on to explain why they can't leave any of the outfits behind.
Voyager is the best series and for you to not think just exactly the same as me is going to make me watch all your videos just out of spite. I hope you like your channel getting views.
My main thought on this is that often when we see a ship being evacuated, in various series, the crew get evacuated into shuttles and the shuttles fly away just before the ship explodes. Now, we also never see more than about four people (from memory) in a shuttle at a given time, and usually even then one or two of them are lurking around standing up instead of in seats (Orville's right about the seatbelts thing!), and I imagine that if the shuttles ARE used as lifeboats, there must be some sort of Starfleet rule requiring each ship always has enough to evacuate the entire crew. Voyager's total crew complement is meant to be 200, but the number of crew mentioned in the show is always somewhere between 140 and 160. Even being generous and saying you can fit six people to a shuttle (which we never see), that would mean nearly 35 shuttles for a fully-stocked Voyager, and around 26 for everyone in the crew even for the short mission to the Badlands. Of course, Voyager is a new ship and not 100% complete at the time of leaving DS9, but even so lifeboats for everyone would be fairly high on the list of priorities when heading off on a mission in a dangerous area of space, so... More than enough shuttles. That said, you'd still think they might put in a line somewhere about losing shuttles. If you're down to 9 shuttles (26 minus 17 lost), that's going to be a concern if you can only fit 5-6 people in a shuttle and you might want to evacuate 150 people.
Didn't Tom Paris and Co. pretty much build the Delta Flyer? So that means Voyager did have/find the resources to build replacements for other lost shuttles, repair ship's damage, etc. memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Delta_Flyer
A) If they could build the Delta Flyer from scratch it stands to reason they have the capability to build shuttles from scratch. I just wish the writers had thought to write that in. In Season 1 make the episode of building a regular old shuttle from scratch a big deal. Then later Tom upgrades and builds the Delta Flyer. B) What I find utterly unforgivable is that the writers themselves utterly seemed to forget that Neelix has a ship in the shuttle bay! Think about all the implications of that one!
I wouldn't classify either The Delta Flyer or The Delta Flyer II as a shuttlecraft. They're both much more akin to a full-on Danube or even Yellowstone-class Runabout given their size, speed, armaments, and defensive capabilities. Or at the very least, they're both a unique class of starship that far exceeds a standard shuttle but is inferior to a Runabout in certain aspects. Even still, the amount of standard shuttles that they seem to have on-hand is crazy and leads to other questions OTHER than "Where do they come from?" 1. Why does Voyager have so many TYPES of shuttles on board? Off the top of my head (without researching) I can recall at least five different classes of shuttles (some of which were unique to the show) being deployed from Voyager. 2. If Voyager were so far from -- and cut-off from -- The Federation, how did they continually upgrade to the newest (or at least many different) classes of shuttlecraft? Did they already have the classified blueprints and specs in the ship's computer and decide, "Well, we need to build a new one. Might as well make the Type-X since we just lost the Type-Y variant."? 3. The Intrepid-class is one of the smallest starships in Starfleet. Where were they housing all of those shuttles? Of course this question is less important if they were manufacturing them on an as-needed basis. These questions are even more mind-boggling than the fact that they seemed to have an unlimited number of shuttles on board.
My best explaination, is that they could build new shuttles, since as long as they had replicators, power to run them and raw materials, they could at least fabricate the parts to build new shuttles. The real limiting factor for almost everything on Voyager, was finding supplies of antimatter for the warp core, to provide power to run everything.
The answer is obvious. Tom Paris made all the shuttle craft in his spare time, between his two jobs, multiple hobbies, inventing warp 10 and his committed relationship.
They also had enough room to keep Nelix's ship onboard too.
If the non-cannon wiki page is correct, Nelix's ship is shorter then the Delta Flyer
The used 87 of their 32 torpedoes.
They actually used 123, adding the deficit of 85 they were left with to the 38 they started the series with. And they didn’t even fire all of those! At one point, they converted a bunch of them into biomolecular torpedoes that they never used!
right now at this moment in time defence companies are drawing up drones with onboard 3d printers that will print different size missiles/bombs during missions.
Suffice to say Voyagers replicators easily let her do the same, all she needs are materials to make the warheads which it may even be able to replicate.
All while DS9 had to try to bluff the Cardassians with their only six photon torpedoes in their first episode.
i do love when they take the 12 remaining and turn them into 15 biomolecular torpedoes, and then keep using the negative 3
I HAVE AN ANSWER! The reason they have seemingly infinite shuttles is because nothing is real, this is all just a holodeck recreation being watched by Riker.
Or it's just the Holodeck inside of a box sitting on someone's table.
Something I find really funny is that DS9 did an objectively better job with this sort of attention to detail with runabouts even though they had way less of a reason to; they keep the names of the runabouts currently at the station consistent, they always get exactly one new runabout every time one is destroyed, and there's exactly one (Rio Grande) that survives for the entire run of the show as sort of a background easter egg which is never mentioned at all by the characters.
Re-warching this older video and you joke about how Voyager should just chuck shuttles at the Borg, and I suddenly remembered they did EXACTLY THIS in the episode Dark Frontier where the queen makes that offer to spare voyager if seven returns. They literally throw a shuttle to the borg to have them assimilate it for no other reason than to DISTRACT THEM!!!
The problem with the shuttlecraft isn't the shuttlecraft, its that it was symptomatic of how the series was written; they didn't really want to be lost in space, they just wanted to have unlimited license to create new alien empires and to show lots and lots of borg.
Hear me out. What if the whole reason they're on replicator rations isn't because they're far from home, but because they're using so much power replicating parts for all the shuttlecraft that they keep losing?
Shuttlecraft, hull plates, bits and bobs for Engineering, making spare parts, you name it. Food you can find, parts you gotta make.
What your looking for is Ronald D. Moore. The producer that was on Star Trek and then went on to make Battlestar Galactica.
Voyager was supposed to be gritty, a ship on the edge of the universe. It was how a Federation ship would survive while dealing with rations and being constantly under attack and a crew that is just barely keeping it's self together. That was the original premise that got greenlit. But as they ramped up production all that grittiness got taken away.
Much of that idea, Ronald D. Moore went on to make Battlestar Galactica with.
@sweinberger probably the exec's wanted to keep Voyager pretty and federation looking. Its only recently that more realism is allowed in scifi shows.
Maybe that's why replicator power was rationed? They needed the replicators to create more components.
Ya but there should have been parts that replicators shouldn't have been able to make.
@@boredfangerrude that doesn't make sense.
The industrial replicator responsible for manufacturing shuttlecraft malfunctioned when they arrived in the Delta Quadrant and won't stop making shuttles. The crew of Voyager HAS to "lose" a few shuttlecraft every year to keep from overloading the shuttlebay.
Its like the AI paperclip paradox in microcosm....that or just bad writing.
They have industrial replicators on board. They established that when building the Delta Flyer.
They did a lot of "We stopped at this planet to get stuff." episodes to justify having resources.
Exactly!
Probably had them dismantled in storage boxes. Want a new shuttlecraft? Bring out another IKEA box and assemble one. Imagine how many leftover allen wrenches they have cluttering up the place.
Fun fact: Voyager could have made it back to the alpha quadrant in about 3 weeks if they didn't have thousands of shuttles weighing them down. Janeway was trying to offload them for weight reduction
I do love Voyager, just got me the DVD box and have by now nearly finished season 2. What bothers me more than the number of shuttles is the fact that they just leave the crashed shuttles behind. They make a big deal out of NOT sharing starfleet technology with other species - but just abandon warp-capable, technology-packed little spaceships on random planets and asteroids...
That's a really good point. Sometimes you see them destroy the shuttles, but I guess sometimes they don't.
What bothers me is sometimes the shuttles seem to have warp capability, and sometimes they don't.
they leave them set to detonate when they get scanned or entered, as a fun starfleet game
My problem with Voyager was that the ship always looked new. Even in the pilot when they get taken to the Delta Quadrant they sustain a lot of damage and loss of life. Yet by the end of the episode everything is pristine. They also have enough surplus energy they can use a holodeck. They have limited resources and made all kinds of modifications to the ship yet its back looking new the following episode.
Fun fact. There was no room for crew quarters on the ship, due to all the shuttles, so everyone just had their own shuttle craft to sleep in.
Every time a shuttle is lost that's someones losing their room with all their stuff in it, and they shed a tear over the thought of all the sleeping on floors they shall be doing in the long years a head. :(
That's actually a really good point... When I think about it, Voyager loses far more shuttles than DS9 loses runabouts, and in DS9 they even make a big deal about having to replace runabouts - "I'm glad Earth has so many rivers"
You can replicate spacecraft and other vehicles piece by piece using replicators, kind of like putting together Ikea furniture. We saw Sisko do that with his light ship replica....the problem with that is that the Voyager crew are always complaining about their replicator rations being low, and I strongly doubt replicating the alloys and rare earth minerals required for a shuttle is any less resource intense than making a bunch of rice and beans to feed the crew.
Maybe the reason they were always running out of rations and torpedoes was because they kept building so many extra shuttlecraft.
This reminds me. One of the little things I love about BSG is that any time stuff gets blown up by the Cylons or rogue elements inside the fleet, in the next episode's opening credits the number of humans counted in the fleet goes down.
I remember that, that was chilling! really well done to show some impact
To really drive home the idea that they had no supply lines and were running low on materials, the ship and its equipment could have degraded as time went by. Security personnel would end up using alien weapons as phasers were lost or broke. One of the ship's nacelles might be blown off and replaced with a mismatched one. Its easier to adapt alien spare parts, than to waste resources replicating an exact Starfleet component. By the time they got home, the ship's hull would look like patchwork of scavenged parts. They did have alien food in the canteen, though.
That would have been great.
I feel like, especially in the era of Voyager, TV show producers had this rule they had to impose on the creators of the show. It's like the show still had have a high degree of continuity, even if the viewer randomly shuffled the episodes and watched them out of order. Only small details were allowed to be changed - even in the course of the whole series. Things like love interests could change, minor characters could go away or new could come along (especially in an ensemble cast situation like Star Trek). But the major details had to remain instantly recognizable. Probably in hopes that 20 years later the show would still be running in syndication and airing order might be disregarded. Or maybe that some syndication deals might not involve the whole series, only the best 100 episodes or something like that. Even if that never happened, it feels like the big wigs behind production planned for that eventuality and the result was all these problems mentioned in the video and in this comment section.
You mean like BSG did? ;-)
Here is the thing. Shows from the early 2000s and before were not written expecting people to bing watch these over and over again discussing on all of these little plot holes and continuity errors.
I have to say the Equinox was a more accurate portrayal of a ship stuck in the Delta quadrant than Voyager was. Yeah, we all hope we’d maintain our morality but, seriously?
I always assume they built new ones. All the parts can be fabricated on Voyager. The ship was designed to be a long range explorer.
Obviously the reason they are still eating Neelix's cooking 7 years into the show: all their energy is going into replicating shuttlecraft parts. I can see Janeway now on loosing another shuttle, "Great, there's another 4 months of eating Neelix's 'food'".
🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Same idea. Plus they prioritize on shuttlecraft fabrication so much that they fall drastically-short on torpedo-production.
Which is odd, since shelled-out torpedoes are used for coffins... For some missions it'd have been cheaper to just load the away-team into a torpedo, or retrofit a torpedo to test a warp-drive for one.
Think about this: As many times as Voyager was boarded, hijacked, or basically left almost completely un-space-worthy, they somehow managed to repair it to "new" status by the next episode. I'd say that's even more monumental than continuously replacing shuttles.
Yeah, this. They have to ration replicator power for food, BUT they can run the holodeck non-stop, keep all the lights at 100% even in sections they're not using, create unlimited replacement shuttles and they never, EVER run out of PAINT for the outer hull.
What poor schlub has to go out there with the brush and repaint the numbers after every battle? Oh wait. Lister.
@@daniellyon5011 Probably Vorick as punishment for trying to sexually assault and then murder Torres.
short answer: they build the delta flyer in a few days, they can definately build standard federatiom shuttlecraft
I know why their food and clothing replicator use was rationed: Because they needed extra energy for their shuttlecraft replicator.
Right? :)
I love the Delta Flyer and I totally get why Tom Paris would want to build it, but its appearance was the moment I stopped taking Voyager seriously as a show. In terms of the show's premise, they couldn't have handled it worse.
Same reason Voyager gets reset to tip top condition at the beginning of each episode - Industrial replicators, which can create parts needed to repair Voyager, in addition to shuttle parts that can be assembled into a new shuttle each time one is needed (albeit, at a far greater cost than photo torpedoes). It's perfectly normal for a long term scientific/exploration ship to have one aboard, in case they're too far from a base to replenish parts and equipment.
The infinite shuttle craft doesn't bother me so much as Tom's insistence on putting in those nonsense Captain Proton joysticks instead a standard federation control console designed by actual engineers and with a proven track record in the field because suddenly Tom's some kind of 24th century hipster now for some reason.
Actually I'm surprised how much shuttles were used at all, compared to TNG. They're in a hostile area of space with no allies and yet the command staff are routinely taking them out, by themselves, on extended missions out of com range.
Where are they going? And are there any instances where the shuttles aren't attacked, sucked into a anomaly and are ultimately lost? Why didn't they learn?
Damn good point, sorry to say I over-looked it.
It isn't even narrative consistent to send command staff away from the ship!
Yet it is done all the time, often becoming an example of why they shouldn't....
@3:20 ish.. This is exactly what Ronald D Moore wanted and why he was forced out in the end because he kept pushing for crew and the ship to have consequences for things happening over the course of the series with the end goal of Voyager looking beat to hell. Well he did get his wish in a way.... He got to make BSG.
The problem wit this issue is that the answer is easy, but the writers were too lazy to do it. Building the Delta Flyer shows that they could in fact build shuttlecraft. So it makes sense that they could be building new shuttles. They just needed one episode where they mention, 'crap we have to build a new shuttlecraft'. Or have a shuttle blow up and someone laments, 'there goes all our replicator rations for a month.'
Unlike DS9 where the crew always had to ask permition to take a runabout and Sisko was angry when one was lost.
I recently saw an article saying that nerding out was encouraged in DS9 writers rooms, while it was frowned upon in Voyager's writers rooms. I think a lot of voyagers' issues come back to this. The writers weren't discussing implications for the future of the story, nor were they discussing the history that they'd written. It's a real shame because voyager really needed a somewhat more serialized structure, and much more attention given to the limitations of its isolated ship format.
I think the bigger question to this question isn't how do they have so many shuttlecraft, but why are the damaged ones left behind. It has been mentioned multiple times through out the show, and mainly by Captain Janeway herself is the the federation does not share technology. Other characters through out the Star Trek universe has said it, but none more so than the crew of Voyager. All the Kazon that are following Voyager need to do is recover one of the discarded shuttlecraft and they have access to tons of new more powerful tech than they have ever had and become one of the most powerful forces in their section of the quadrant.
You could make the same criticism about personnel losses. They've suffered a number of casualties, yet they seem to still have a full complement. There's no mention of having to adjust the duty rosters, no double shifts or having to learn new roles to cover the staffing gaps, and they still seem to have an abundance of free time for holodecking and attending parties and such.
There's a reason that the "Baby Voyagers" on Prodigy have a shuttle replicator in their vehicle bay, since the project was headed by Chakotay! 🤣
Voyager could have been better if it had a more BSG vibe, dent the ship add to the ship. In other words what returned home should have been a bastardize borg cube, mixed with Malon, Voth and other species ship bits.
Also more weapons and tech, if you remember the episode where Seven thinks she was attacked by the weapons sales man, well we should see the ship with the weapon they bought.
The year of hell stuff could have played out more often. In order to save on power the crew couldn't order food from the replicators in their quaters, they had to go see Nelix and get what ever he was doing that day, but they could power Fair Haven and build what ever they wanted ?
You forgot to mention the Aero Shuttle that was built into Voyager.... that they never actually used in the show itself.
The tension the failed to build with resource scarcity facing Voyager was a major missed opportunity.
That particular issue was addressed in episode about Eqinox, another smaller Starfleet ship also lost in Delta Quadrant. It's Capt. Ransom, got so desperate that started drain lifeforms and using their life energy has fuel boost power to ships engines.
An even bigger part of this is the complete lack of any battle scars on Voyager itself after countless battles that they barely escaped from over the years. The damage control crews really must have had their hands full meticulously replacing every piece of hull plating each time they got shot so the ship looked like it was fresh out of spacedock even rolling into the series finale. If they can give Voyager a complete overhaul after every battle without any new equipment or supplies, replicating a few dozen replacement shuttlercraft must be a piece of cake
I think the reason the infinite shuttles bothers you is that it’s indicative of how poorly thought out Voyager was. It’s tied into to your big gripe that Voyager was OBSESSED with its status quo. Nothing was allowed to change from episode to episode; there could be no long-term consequences, not even anything as small as “Guys, we’re out of shuttles.”
To me, Voyager just seems like it was a mess of a series. But not even in the fun way like Enterprise was. Voyager was just dull.
It could have been great if they stuck to the premise - that they were on their own with limited supplies. There was so much story to be had from them actually having to make and scrape and get creative with what they had. The status quo should have been fixing that ship with duct tape and bubble gum, avoiding damages, tracking resources, finding more. It could have been interesting seeing them work around their supposed difficulties.
true dat.
There are some things you just can't un-see.
When a video I watched pointed out that Captain Picard has a crystal on his ready room desk, and he is constantly fondeling it... I lost my mind because through my million viewings, I never noticed it ONCE!
Now there is this...
To everyone saying “replicators” as the beginning and ending of their rebuttal, explain to me why they have unlimited power and resources to replicate shuttles, but Neelix needs to grow and cook food for the crew because they can’t replicate enough to feed everyone?
Heck, DS9 went through a fair number of Runabouts, not as many as Voyager did shuttles, on a mining station with dedicated refineries and even mentioned large scale replicators being needed for large items, and they still needed to have Starfleet deliver new Runabouts to the station as replacements. They literally mention receiving replacements, as well as the Captain naming them.
So why does a space station, that dwarfs the Voyager and was built to be a refinery, need Starfleet to replace what is admittedly a larger and more complex craft than a shuttle, but an experimental long range spacecraft with limited resources and energy does not?
Three words: conservation of resources.
Besides, one of those resources is time. Time spent by a replicator replicating leola root pilaf, latara broth, or Talaxian omelette, cannot at the same time be spent by the same replicator in replicating warp coils, photon torpedo parts, RCS thrusters, thrust nozzles, sensor parts, etc. No doubt everyone enjoys their Bajoran Kava juice, their Jiballian fudge cake, and their Banean Rolk, and does not like missing their yummy Klingon Heart of targ - but there are more important things even than Janeway’s morning coffee.
So Neelix makes the arrangements for providing the food, leaving the replicators free to be used for replicating parts and elements for shuttles and photon torpedoes.
Also, why does Voyager have more Torpedoes then they said they have, LOL?
One aspect that gets over looked is the amount of people that are lost and as far as we know not replaced. The only replacements or new crew are Neelix, Kes, seven of nine, and the borg children. The only ones to stay till the end are Neelix, seven of nine and the older borg child. They wouldn't need to kill off or replace the bridge crew, but it would have been better had they shown different aliens starting to slowly replace the crew. These could easily been explained as refugees that decided to come along to outcast of their societies that the voyager crew decided to give asylum.
Type 9 Shuttlecraft are literally the first near fully modular shuttle in the fleet, with basically 90% of the ship being able to be fabricated on board the vessel of choice.
Seeing how voyager mined and traded with almost every species and system they went through, I can see them NEVER running out of shuttles as long as the ship can find a source of materials.
There's a few things like that that bother me. The big one is why on Earth is Voyager able to land on planets? Who thought it was worthwhile to install landing gear in a giant spaceship that by all accounts shouldn't have any reason to ever land?
The other thing is the replicator rations. If replicator is rationed, how is it that whenever Janeway orders soup, the soup comes with a bowl? Why not reuse a bowl you already have? Surely it takes way more energy to make the bowl than the soup!
It adds energy. That's true.
And her fsvorite cup... what?
We never see her put it into the replicator but she always take that cup out having ordered coffee.
How can that cup be "the" favorite cup.
And besides when it's ruined she can always just replicate a new one!!
Anyone remember the Voyager plot point that had the ship only 38 Torpedo's with "no way to replace them?" then ended up using close to 100 during the shows 7 season run.
You answered your own question. They can replicate all the shuttle craft parts they need to build new ones. They are stuck in the Delta Quadrant, what else are they going to do with their time? They just don't have any episodes on it because Star Trek - Mechanics isn't exciting enough.
Photon torpedoes apparently have some components that can't be replicated, (yea, that's a thing in the Star Trek universe) so they make trades with other civilizations to restock. Star Trek - Commerce would also not make very exciting episodes.
To me, this was the entire problem with Voyager in a nutshell. Instead of embracing the show's premise of an isolated ship with limited resources, they just wrote the show the same way they did TNG which relied heavily on the trope of constantly rotating equipment and personnel to explain why things show up in one episode despite never being seen or referenced before or after.
I get that Star Trek (at least back then and excepting DS9) relied on the old school entirely episodic approach to television, but that format just doesn't really work with Voyager's premise.
now in 2024 we've seen shuttle replicator in Prodigy....it's now addressed that plot hole for future treks
To quote Memory Alpha: "Located on deck 10, in the aft dorsal portion of the secondary hull, shuttlebay 1 was the primary port for entrance and egress for auxiliary craft and shuttles. Shuttlebay 1 was a large L-shaped room. (VOY: "Alice", "Q2")
Behind the main shuttlebay was an even larger hangar, known as shuttlebay 2, where the construction, repair and maintenance of auxiliary craft was performed. Shuttlebay 2 could also be depressurized and spacecraft could be launched from there. (VOY: "Threshold", "Extreme Risk", "In the Flesh")"
The ship was designed to have facilities to construct and repair shuttlecraft.
They mention conserving torpedoes but they blow through their entire quoted stock several times. I don't have a problem with the idea of them replicating more of them, and even shuttlecraft hulls etc, but where's the antimatter and Dilithium coming from to power these things? I'm pretty sure they can't replicate either of those for some odd in-universe reason.
I mean, not that they don't violate physics as we currently understand it pretty routinely, but if they're using dilithium as a power source, you'd be getting free energy (and therefore in principle infinite energy) if they could replicate the fuel for less energy cost than the replicated fuel can itself generate. So that doesn't seem very odd at all: The reason would be "you can't magic energy out of nothing; you'd have to burn (or whatever) more dilithium in the process of creating it than you'd get out, because whatever energy it stores had to come from somewhere"
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, L1, R1. Janeway's shuttlecraft cheat.
Also, I just remembered... they apparently had plenty of room to haul Neelix's ship around for seven fucking years. Surely they would have cannibalized that POS like in the first or second season. Or at the very least during "The Year of Hell" for materials.
It's really quite simple. They build the delta flyer so clearly the engineers on board have the skills and the knowledge to build a simple shuttlecraft, or should I say rebuild.
I never understood why this was a question. They have a crew of 150, roughly 100 of which we barely see, as well as replicators. I assume Janeway had those extra yellowshirts hard at work building shuttles and torpedos on a regular basis.
Unpopular opinion: Voyager is my favorite Star Trek series. Mostly because of the Doctor and Seven of Nine, but still my favorite.
Maybe they're so strict with the food rations because they use the replicators to make shuttle craft parts.
Voyager has nothing on the apparent number of smaller ships (shuttlecraft?) that Discovery seems to be carrying in its season finale fights.
What's even worse is that in the episode _Alice,_ Chakotay says "we've already got a full complement of shuttles, not to mention the Delta Flyer".
HUH? A FULL complement? You've lost like 20 of them by this point.
See this I only caught on a rewatch a few months back after seeing this video. I am just rewatching today to enjoy the voyager stupidity.
They should have made it so during the progress of all the seasons of Voyager, the ship became more of a Frankenstein vessel. Whereby they had to salvage ship parts and armor from alien craft they found / had help from. So when they do return to the Federation, the ship is totally unrecognizable to Starfleet.
I was just assuming they were replicating new shuttles. I mean these aren't advanced craft, they're SHUTTLES. They have like what, warp 2 capacity? I like to think that a micromanager like Janeway would be able to say "Crew- starting today everyone will take mandatory flight lessons from Tom because you keep screwing up with my shuttle reserves!" if there was a real problem. But what I do want to know is where does that extra dilithium come from if the shuttles are all warp capable... Hmmmmmm.......
Voyager couldve been phantastic. If Voyager were continously run down, all resources depleted, the crew just short of eating each other... yet they try and try to remain Starfleet. THAT'd been dope.
I do like this criticism. You're right it's a small thing, but it's emblematic of larger issues with the series that you've mentioned elsewhere. Focusing on it sort of highlights the criticism in an easy to comprehend way, the obsession with returning to the status quo after every episode is easier to understand when you put forward a clear example like this one.
The problem is all the more frustrating because it serves as an example of how much more interesting things could have been if they'd run with it instead of handwaved it. It would've been nice for them to buy some local shuttles, take a couple of Maquis shuttles and/or seize some small craft from rivals. It would have made the show a little more visually interesting if they weren't always flying Star Fleet shuttles and shown them as part of a larger social ecology in the Delta Quadran, albeit a transitory one moving through.
Voyager was designed as a research ship so it would have had way more shuttles, larger hanger bay, more labs and science stations than some other type of ship of its size. It was made to do exactly what it ended up doing, explore new regions and be more self-reliant than the average ship.
well...the reason why the replicator rations were so limited was that the crew was replicating shuttle craft EVERY OTHER episode. LOL
oh...and the replicated torpedos too!
SO NO FOOD FOR YOU!
hahaha =D
yes it should bother you. the shuttles, the torpedoes, THE DRASTIC CHANGE IN SHUTTLE AND PHASER DESIGN, the spotless ship, the unlimited power for holodecks, the maquis becoming starfleet with no friction whatsoever, the inconsistent crew complement with no fixed characters even though they are stuck with each other, noone resenting janewas for destroying the array, she and chakotay becoming best buds almost immediately... the list goes on.
@roman c well, they did have a little bit of trouble with the maquis joining the ship, changes in phaser and shuttle design could be upgrading it, crew compliment could be them having crew members leave and new ones coming. Senior officers, plus seven, neelix, vorik, cuhayey (bad spelling) and maybe a few others are constant, mentioned a few times.
Voyager is an Intrepid class ship -- a long range science vessel. An exploration design meant to encounter Enterprise+ levels of strangeness, with little to no support; manufacturing tailored equipment is in its mandate. Essentially, Voyager is in the ideal Federation ship category to get stranded alone in another part of the galaxy. BSG type problems happened to the Nova class Equinox -- a short range planetary science vessel.
Story-wise, Startrek has always been about the Post Scarcity setting. But yeah, they left a lot of opportunities for compelling plot hooks and narrative framing devices on the table. Stargate: Universe pulled it off for a few episodes until they lost faith in their audience and decided to be like everyone else. Oddly, think SG-1 s10e20: Unending is really what VOY was going for.
Dude they built the Delta Flyer twice. I am sure they can build Shuttles
They're supposed to be stranded with minimal supplies.
As with good design, good writing comes from limitations. Lazy/bad design and writing comes from abundance.
It probably bugs you because, out of all the things Voyager should supposedly not have an unlimited supply of, the ubiquitous, seemingly-infinite Star Trek shuttles that ships closer to home have kind of code for and symbolize especially strongly the sheer amount of technology and resources the post-scarcity Federation society has. They have _disposable warp-capable spaceships._ And somehow, Voyager, which is supposed to be as far from Federation society as you should be able to get short of galaxy-hopping, has them... too. It is bizarre.
It is ridiculous. I don't think the writers did a good enough job of having us feel there's any kind of scarcity situation. Apart from the odd mention of getting low on torpedoes or gel packs, people are still replicating frivolous crap, and using the holodeck despite mentioning the need to conserve energy. It would have been really cool if they hammered home the resource scarcity a bit more and made it apparent. It's kind of like people who go "camping" but their car is right there and they have electrical power.
Not trying to defend the show, because I hate Voyager, but maybe the reason they had to ration the replicator usage is because they had to devote so much energy to replicating shuttle parts to build new shuttles?
Ya but there should have been parts that replicators shouldn't have been able to make.
Ron Moore mentions this as the reason he left the series and did Battlestar Galactica
they build them. same with photon torpedoes. they freaking have matter replicators and people think they cant build new photon torpedoes or shuttlecraft? they literally design and build the delta flyer in a few days... in the first few episodes the conflict is because they dont have access to starfleet supply lines and voyager is not equipped to resupply itself from raw materials. its a little glossed over, but its made clear that they make the necessary modifications to make voyager self-sufficient, and one of their major reasons for away missions is to gather raw materials.... I think the "plot hole" only exists because people weren't paying enough attention to the show
Chakotay: We have a compliment of 38 photon torpedos
Janeway: And no way to replace them after they’re gone
Is Janeway such a terrible Captain that she doesn’t know that Voyager has the capability to be modified to gather raw materials for all their needs? Or is it just a plot hole?
I think they can't build new photon torpedoes because they use antimatter which probably can't be replicated.
I started thinking that way but then if you can replicate a shuttle or torpedo or whatever else then why is replicating food so hard? "so on that last mission we lost a shuttle, will probably take two weeks to replicate and assemble a new one". - ok fine but the energy required to make a shuttle has to be the equivalent of a huge amount of food...
anyway... "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts
Then repeat to yourself "It's just a show
I should really just relax"
@@placeholdername3887 That's my head-cannon. It would have been a simple thing for the writers to write a line for Neelix procuring a small amount of antimatter in one of his negotiations and saying something like "enough for 3 photon torpedoes" to explain why they fired off more than 38 during the 7-season run. It would also allow them to have the supply of torpedoes on hand to be limited in some episodes to increase tension in the plot but allow the supply to be replenished several episodes later.
Here's the thing. The replicators on the ship can definitely replicate parts, which can be used to assemble shuttles. I assume shuttles are a very simple craft to build. They're probably designed to be simple, easy to replicate the parts and assemble. The problem here...is Voyager. They're supposed to be stranded and have to conserve power/supplies, and replicators take a lot of both power and bulk matter to transform. (Replicators do NOT create things out of energy, they work by transforming storage of bulk matter, which is stored in an efficient form.) This has to be replenished too, either by trade, or by using the replicator to break down other objects that are no longer needed. And that doesn't even get into the energy requirements. If Janeway can't even replicate her coffee because of power limitations, then they sure as hell aren't replicating shuttle parts.
It'd make sense for Voyager (and all Federation ships really) to have a stock of spare ready-to-assemble shuttles (the number varying by the size of the ship), I could see the parts being stored in racks in a cargo bay or something. But Voyager is not a large ship, and it certainly doesn't have enough space to store enough parts to build 17 shuttles. I could see a couple, maybe 2-3, but no more.
Thing about replicators: most “official technical manuals” say replicators require “raw stock” in order to function. For foodstuffs, that means converting vegetable matter (for example, grasses from uninhabited planets) to a more “digestible” form; for industrial parts (such as parts for assembling shuttles) that means any form of matter - say, bits from a drifting asteroid.
Replicators do use an high degree of energy, which is why replicator use is rationed, but Voyager certainly would put out enough energy to replace a shuttle / Flyer after a month.
Replicators. I could stop at that, but I feel like rambling.
The problem isn't bad writing of a struggle to survive, it's limited exposition of exactly what post-scarcity remote exploration is like. Playing it safe with replicator rations in early seasons was probably overkill, and I imagine it was just there to hint that things aren't running as perfectly smoothly as they might, but they're really not that bad. Nobody's starving, nobody's having a horrible time, they're just being cautious with the luxuries, so that important things (like shuttle replacements) aren't impeded in stupidly avoidable ways. It would be much more jarring and unbelievable writing if they expected us to believe that Voyager was soooo bad off, compared with the Enterprise-D standard, just because they couldn't immediately run to starbase every time things went a little sour. Starfleet is supposed to be supremely competent, especially at keeping starships trekking.
Consider that every time Enterprise-D loses a shuttle, we never once see them rushing home to starbase to pick up replacements, nor do we ever see replacements being delivered to them. Considering all the weird and wonderful ways they futz with the deflector dish and repair major structural damage weekly, it's no stretch of imagination at all to suggest that they could be routinely fabricating partial or whole shuttlecraft on their own. And from a writing point of view, that leaves "going back to stardock" as a major, surprising event, worthy of holding the audience's attention. They don't have to waste our time with petty logistics, because to both the writers and the characters, spare shuttles are a trivial thing. Data designs and builds an entire daughter-droid from scratch, mostly on his own, and that's definitely a much bigger engineering challenge than following a standard, ready-made shuttle blueprint. But simply getting the parts for Lal? That's obviously no challenge at all, and the writers waste none of our time explaining how and when Data did his basic shopping.
Looking at a real-world sea ships analogy, we're actually in a weird stage of boat construction today. 300 years ago, if the crew of a big sailing ship needed a little row boat, they most likely carried all the tools and skills needed to make that happen. They might have to stop for extra wood, but maybe they even had enough spare timber that they could make their own row boat while on the move, if needed. And with replicators and Starfleet training, it's easy to imagine a starship crew 300 years from now could also just assemble their own little shuttles (plus any and all machinery needed for that), perhaps more easily than the manual woodworking of the past. It's just today that we're in a funny in-between stage, when modern ship crews almost certainly lack the tools and expertise to build their own metal or fibre glass boat, or rubber dingy. I doubt many of them even have the carpentry needed to make an old-fashioned wooden boat. And we post-industrial, pre-replicator humans think that's normal, that things can only be made in a factory by specialists far away. We, as an audience, don't typically think to be self-sufficient, except as an act of desperation. But that attitude wouldn't make sense for Starfleet crews, even if they didn't have replicators to make it a million times easier.
If VOY is flawed for not correcting our perceptions about this more forcefully, then so is all of Trek. But I think, taken as a whole franchise, they _do_ give a clear enough impression, and VOY came late enough in the franchise that it could take a few things for granted, without having to restate them explicitly.
Exactly ! :)
Remember when they found a old truck floating in space and when they tried to start it it started first time. The battery was not flat after years floating in space.
I'm tired of this argument. Voyager didn't start with a deuterium refinery, but we were told they built one. They didn't have a dilithium cracking station, but they mentioned building one. They built an air-ponics bay. They built an astrometrics lab. They did major maintenance work that they said would normally need a starbase facility, but they improvised a way to make it work. We watched them build the Delta Flyer from scratch. Why is it so hard believe that they could build more shuttles or torpedoes? Okay, it was never explicitly stated that they did, but I never felt that they needed to. It seemed pretty obvious to me.
They make replacement shuttles as they go.
There always on the look out for resources and I'm sure they don't give all there resource collection screen time.
So raw materials and fabrication replicators and there you go. More shuttles.
Nurgles Grin
and torpedoes..
Kind of hard to believe they had the energy to create endless shuttles when they're all on replicator rations, the future's equivalent to food stamps. Because a little locket requires two weeks of rations, it stands to reason that constantly replicating super complex shuttle parts would be unreasonable, due to the energy constraints the writers put in place.
"Because some objects needed more energy to replicate than others, a replicator ration was not simply equal to one use of the replicator. Instead, a replicator ration was equal to a certain amount of energy used by the replicator for producing the requested object. For example a clarinet, a complicated object to replicate, required a week's worth of rations as opposed to one ration to use the replicator one time. (VOY: "Parturition") Tom Paris' present for Kes, a locket, required two week's worth of rations. (VOY: "Twisted")"
memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Replicator_ration
There really is no logical explanation for all the shuttles. The writers just derped on this one.
@@Fermion. The whole "energy shortage" is completely insane. It's an obvious plot device and nothing else.
All their replicators double as "matter-energy converters". When they put their dishes into the replicator where do they go? Into energy, E=MC^2.
So they keep on going through these massive asteroid fields with shat-tons of asteroids larger than the ship itself, they frequently run into debris fields of ships and such which have been blown up. They regularly stop at junk yards to find that "specific part", but *all* of that matter could easily and readily be converted into energy with the push of a button.
Imagine how many shuttle-craft and photon torpedoes one could replicate with just one asteroid field that contains 10,000,000,000x the mass of Voyager. Hell, you could replicate entire new starships for remote-control, replicate larger replicators and drones to go out and farm more energy off the random junk littering the place.
Or hey, just park the damn ship in a nebula open the Bussard Collectors while the ship coasts through and consumes virtually unlimited matter for unlimited energy.
Maybe the had futuristic inflatable shuttlecrafts. Just pull the cord and Bam, instant shuttle craft
Maybe they have a modular design that allows them to be replicated one piece at a time and assembled?
I always assumed that. Yet, pretty much every other show has established that shuttles aren't easy or cheap to make. Even if they had a formula 1 crew standing by to put those shuttles together, there's wear and tear on replicators (they do break down, as shown on other shows), as well as energy that could have been used for other purposes.
I don't think the shuttles had to be nigh irreplaceable, but it would have been nice if they pretended a little. Even if just to mention that they can't get replicator rations that week, because they lost yet another shuttle.
Even the original Battlestar Galactica series mentions having replicators onboard to replenish Vipers that are lost. It's how they made the daggit for Boxie.
I remember watching the show as a kid when they said they had a limited amount of photon torpedo's feeling a sense of suspense. They definitely should have pushed the limited resources angle more.
I always assumed that they replicated parts to build new shuttles but they needed energy and matter for replications so they had to ration things for long term energy and material security.
I agree with this sentiment. There was a two part episode, I think it was called The Year of Hell. Where they were involved with a ship who's captain kept trying to alter time to save his family. Chakotay had replicated a watch for Janeway's birthday. He comments that it was done prior to the conflict. She says she can't take it because it's a meal or a hypospray. This sense of not having anything. Of struggling to maintain the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation in the face of no resources, conflict and hardship should have been what Voyager was about. They touched on it with the other Starfleet ship that turned to piracy. However, Voyager always seemed to have enough of everything. This was the wrong play to use.
That's actually why I loved the episode "The Void" as much as I did. It is easily one of the best if not the best episode of Voyager, when they were trapped in a tiny pocket universe with barely any resources whatsoever, scrounging for leftovers, fending off pirates and forming new alliances. It was terrific. And had exactly the kind of desperate survival and prevailing of Federation values under hardship theme that Voyager should have had during its entire course.
Voyager is disappointing not just because of inconsistent and lazy writing, but mostly because it could have done so much more with its premises. There are glimpses here and there, where they seem to strike gold more by accident than anything else, but they mostly snap back into their comfort zone of being a generic Trek series. Which is not bad at all (especially compared to what calls itself Star Trek nowadays), but it could have been so much more.
Industrial grade replicators? I remember Data talking about one, and I can see a vessel like Voyager carrying one for shuttle creation.
Why would a mid range vessel need a workshop of that scale when they just hop home?
A galaxy class is a fleet operations craft. It needs anything it can get to support a fleet.
The intrepid was a mid-range explorer. Granted it was top of the line.
Why did the Howells have so many clothes for a three hour tour?
Arguably, it was part of the stereotype of rich people having an outfit for every eventuality. You see a lot of that in 90s TV at any rate, where someone packs way too many bags and then goes on to explain why they can't leave any of the outfits behind.
Voyager is the best series and for you to not think just exactly the same as me is going to make me watch all your videos just out of spite. I hope you like your channel getting views.
My main thought on this is that often when we see a ship being evacuated, in various series, the crew get evacuated into shuttles and the shuttles fly away just before the ship explodes. Now, we also never see more than about four people (from memory) in a shuttle at a given time, and usually even then one or two of them are lurking around standing up instead of in seats (Orville's right about the seatbelts thing!), and I imagine that if the shuttles ARE used as lifeboats, there must be some sort of Starfleet rule requiring each ship always has enough to evacuate the entire crew. Voyager's total crew complement is meant to be 200, but the number of crew mentioned in the show is always somewhere between 140 and 160. Even being generous and saying you can fit six people to a shuttle (which we never see), that would mean nearly 35 shuttles for a fully-stocked Voyager, and around 26 for everyone in the crew even for the short mission to the Badlands. Of course, Voyager is a new ship and not 100% complete at the time of leaving DS9, but even so lifeboats for everyone would be fairly high on the list of priorities when heading off on a mission in a dangerous area of space, so... More than enough shuttles.
That said, you'd still think they might put in a line somewhere about losing shuttles. If you're down to 9 shuttles (26 minus 17 lost), that's going to be a concern if you can only fit 5-6 people in a shuttle and you might want to evacuate 150 people.
They have escape pods for evacuations.
Voyager collects supplies as they go along. And they have "spare parts" to construct more shuttles because of a great plot device called replicators
Didn't Tom Paris and Co. pretty much build the Delta Flyer? So that means Voyager did have/find the resources to build replacements for other lost shuttles, repair ship's damage, etc. memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Delta_Flyer
A) If they could build the Delta Flyer from scratch it stands to reason they have the capability to build shuttles from scratch. I just wish the writers had thought to write that in. In Season 1 make the episode of building a regular old shuttle from scratch a big deal. Then later Tom upgrades and builds the Delta Flyer. B) What I find utterly unforgivable is that the writers themselves utterly seemed to forget that Neelix has a ship in the shuttle bay! Think about all the implications of that one!
I wouldn't classify either The Delta Flyer or The Delta Flyer II as a shuttlecraft. They're both much more akin to a full-on Danube or even Yellowstone-class Runabout given their size, speed, armaments, and defensive capabilities. Or at the very least, they're both a unique class of starship that far exceeds a standard shuttle but is inferior to a Runabout in certain aspects. Even still, the amount of standard shuttles that they seem to have on-hand is crazy and leads to other questions OTHER than "Where do they come from?"
1. Why does Voyager have so many TYPES of shuttles on board? Off the top of my head (without researching) I can recall at least five different classes of shuttles (some of which were unique to the show) being deployed from Voyager.
2. If Voyager were so far from -- and cut-off from -- The Federation, how did they continually upgrade to the newest (or at least many different) classes of shuttlecraft? Did they already have the classified blueprints and specs in the ship's computer and decide, "Well, we need to build a new one. Might as well make the Type-X since we just lost the Type-Y variant."?
3. The Intrepid-class is one of the smallest starships in Starfleet. Where were they housing all of those shuttles? Of course this question is less important if they were manufacturing them on an as-needed basis.
These questions are even more mind-boggling than the fact that they seemed to have an unlimited number of shuttles on board.
Shuttlecraft: The Voyager equivalent of Legolas's arrows. ;)
Extra shuttles: okay sure!
Photon torpedoes: wait, we only have a limited amount...
My best explaination, is that they could build new shuttles, since as long as they had replicators, power to run them and raw materials, they could at least fabricate the parts to build new shuttles. The real limiting factor for almost everything on Voyager, was finding supplies of antimatter for the warp core, to provide power to run everything.