Shuttlecraft

The Galileo-type shuttlecraft makes its first appearance in 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The plot required—and the budget allowed—the folks making the movie to build full-scale models of the shuttle as well as Enterprise’s shuttle bay. They made good use of both.

The folk working on Star Trek: The Next Generation—about halfway through its seven-year run at the time—jumped at the opportunity to re-use models and sets the film had already paid for, despite the film being set ~75 years earlier. Apparently the Type 7 shuttle which TNG already had was extremely difficult to work with.

Redressing Galileo’s models and sets gave the various 24^th-century Treks the Type 6, 6A, and 8 shuttles.

Back on earth, engineers at Toyota were hard at work on what would become the first generation Previa minivan. It seems clear to me that the Previa and the TNG-era shuttles are both products whose design is very much of the late ’80s. And I’m certainly not the only one to note the similarity; the hosts of The Greatest Generation podcast refer to all shuttlecraft as "Previas."

Anyway, all of this is simply to say that I’ve long thought a great project for somebody with fuck you money to take on would be to find a first-gen Previa in great condition and go all Pimp My Ride on it, to turn it into a road-legal Next Gen shuttle. Bonus points for performaing an all-electric conversion on it while you’re at it.