The needs of the narrative outweigh the needs of logic.
Shuttlecraft are short range transports and some are wap-capable.
Not in TOS they weren’t. It was established in “The Menagerie” that they were driven by ion propulsion. In Blish’s Spock Must Die!, Doppelganger Spock surprises everyone by modifying a shuttlecraft to have warp capability, which was apparently a great technical feat in Kirk’s time. Warp-driven shuttlecraft were first seen in TNG, set some 80 years later.
We can argue about how “canon” Blish’s novel was, but in general he stuck pretty close to the ST Writer’s Guide. (I’d have to look in my copy of The Making of Star Trek to be sure, but I believe it’s specified there that shuttlecraft can only travel at sublight speeds.)
In “Metamorphosis” the Galileo II was supposed to rendezvous with the Enterprise in deep space, far from any planetary system. IRL, it would have taken them forever to get there. (Or perhaps they had traveled as far as they already had aboard another starship? If so, it was never mentioned.)
ADDITION: The presence of what appear to be warp nacelles really means nothing. In “The Galileo Seven,” the shuttlecraft was powered by energy drained from hand phasers and was shown leaving an exhaust trail, fer chrissakes! :rolleyes:
Memory Alpha (the ST Wiki) notes:
Bolding mine, as I don’t have the episode on hand t’check.
Fanon/fanwanking aside, though, the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the shuttlecraft can probably be explained perfectly by the fact that 1960s TV Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. 
[quote=“Ranchoth, post:44, topic:683809”]
Makes no difference. The whole point of Kirk and Mendez (even if he was only an illusion created by The Keeper) pursuing the Enterprise was to force Spock to reverse the ship and come and rescue them! They knew perfectly well that they had no hope of catching up to a starship, and that in trying they would soon run out of “fuel” and drift in space.
There is nothing in the above to suggest that a Class F shuttlecraft had even limited warp capability; on the contrary, they were taking advantage of its not being warp-capable!
ADDITION: The limited capabilities of television writers are often too glaringly apparent! 
As I mentioned in my post above, the torpedo drives operate in a state of overload. They have no safeties, regulators, shielding, or heat dissipation measures because they’re supposed to blow up. Since they don’t carry cargo or crew, they don’t need empty space, life support, inertial dampeners, artificial gravity, and all that other stuff. They have a very short range (relatively speaking), so they don’t carry much fuel. All that means they can be very compact and go much faster than a ship.
Recall Journey to Babel, in which the antagonists were deliberately overloading their drives in a similar fashion. Even lugging around all the stuff for the crew, they were still considerably faster than the Enterprise.
Because they were on a suicide mission, yes. That makes sense. However, the thought of torpedoes with no inertial dampening (life forms or no life forms aboard, they still must contain delicate components) and enough energy to travel at speeds exceeding warp 15 boggles the mind! :eek:
Technically, ALL would have to be warp capable as any journey of significance would take months or years. It would be impossible for a shuttlecraft , given its limited size and thus storage capacity (not to mention its lack of a restroom) to be in space for more than a few days.
The series attempted to “modify” this by introducing the larger Runabouts which are definitely warp-capable. However, even these would have to be relatively short-range craft due to their lack of storage capacity.
Was not the first runabout to appear (or even be mentioned) Spock’s ship in TMP? That was a Vulcan design (apparently not Starfleet standard) with a detachable warp sled.
That’s possible.
However, the Runabouts which I was referring to are the larger shuttles which first appeared in TNG and were the primary mode of transport on Deep Sleep Nine until the producers realized that to save the series they’d better get a spaceship.
All of the vessels would have be warp capable as again any voyage besides one from an orbiting vessels down to a planet or moon, would take so long that w/o suspended animation it would mean the deaths of the crew.
Yes, indeed, and a brilliant decision it was! 
It took the Cylons some 50 years, and a **** load of infiltration to pull that off.
Same with ID4…with less infiltration, we didn’t sleep with the aliens in that one.
Though your post did make me think of a nit I hadn’t seen before. The command code shown in Wrath of Khan? It might as well be 1-2-3-4-5.
Well why would it need to be more complicated? They were all one big happy Starfleet!
Yes, really. Fanon - TV Tropes
In the hypothetical you’ve conceived, there probably wouldn’t be fans in the first place, because such a show wouldn’t last very long.
“Because then there wouldn’t be a story” is a definite reason, sure (and that’s what I read your initial use of the term “fanon” to be), but it’s not fanon because it’s not a in-universe reason.
Aha—For the record, I just found the TOS writer’s guide (version as of 1967), which only states that the shuttles are "a six or seven passenger ship which can be sent out on intra-solar system missions. "
(Also, a note at the end of the document that states that the creative staff aren’t on LSD, but not from a lack of trying. Good to know, for the record.)
That’s the same code I have on my luggage!
But yeah, you could assume the five-digit code was preceded by an ultra-encrypted Starfleet header, verifying that the transmission was indeed coming from a Starfleet vessel,only instead of the code for “data to follow”, it was “sudo”. Of course, why it was “sudo -shields” and not “sudo -shutdown” is another matter.
My fanon explanation for why personal phasers don’t have an aim correction on them is that they actually do have it. However, Starfleet tactical officers think that only pussies use it and the first thing most of them do is shut it off. There have been episodes in which the phaser beam does not go in the direction the phaser is pointed and these would be officers who switched auto-aim back on.
As for torpedoes, that’s a tougher one. Apparently if they miss they sail off into space never to be seen again. There has been one torpedo with a guidance package on it, the modified one in ST:VI that blew Chang’s ship up. And that torpedo still wandered all over hell and back before hitting the target! I would theorize that this is some future Geneva Convention issue- because the torpedoes are so powerful it is unethical (and hence illegal) to bolt a guidance package on.
Point defense is the only thing Star Trek (2009) got right. Not only do the main phasers sweep for incoming projectiles, there’s also quite a few dedicated turrets that work like the point defense system on an aircraft carrier. Of course they get the hand phasers all wrong- why does an energy weapon which should only have one moving part (the trigger) need to be manually cocked?
I don’t recall them cocking their phasers, but they did seem to have a fiddly bit near the front that would flip one way or the other depending on if it was set to “Stun” or “Kill”. Still seemed unnecessary, though.
I’m a fan of Star Trek.
That being said, I realize that it it is a childishly naive view of a future that will never be. Roddenberry demonstrated a profound ability to completely ignore human nature in favor of overarching themes which conflict with one another inside his own universe…
Perhaps you see things differently and that would be your opinion of it.
We’ll just have to disagree about your views and leave it at that.
There was a little setting dial on the tiny hand phaser that snapped into the pistol unit.