I'm almost done rewatching the star trek Voyager series and I figure they burn/crash/shoot down atleast a dozen shuttle craft per season. this is usually just before the crew is miraculously beamed out at the last moment before the shuttle explodes, but that is just usual Star Trek protocol.
Let's say a third of those shuttles are actually damaged beyond repair, that makes 4 lost per season * 7 = 28 shuttles over the entire series...
They also rebuild the Deltaflyer after that gets destroyed in S7.
So halfway S5 Tom Paris wants to buy an alien shuttle at a scrapyard (with the rate they burn trough shuttle's you'd think it's a good deal but then commander Chakotgay says: "we have a full compliment of shuttles and the deltaflyer, we dont need another craft..."
The same Chakotgay who keeps mentioning to people they need to conserve energy and food..... You would think a ship that runs trough so many shuttles could use a spare. I mean Enterprise and DS9 could get new shuttles from supply lines or space stations no worries, just send a few new ones out from earth or wherever they built these insane amount of shuttlecraft. But out in the delta Quadrant....
Did we miss an entire deck with a Shuttle manufacturing line and a "chief engineer of shuttles" during the entire series or are they just bulshitting us?
It's the same with the thing where the ship itself doesn't show any damage from week to week. It makes sense for DS9 and the Enterprise - they're in Federation space, they make stop-offs at starbases all the time, so they get some maintenance, rotate crews, repair damage, etc. Remember an entire episode (TNG: Starship Mine) is based around them being docked at a Starbase for a Baryon sweep maintenance, so they took it seriously then. But in reality, the USS Voyager would have broken down in season 2 at the latest, because those ships are clearly designed for regular maintenance that they just don't have access to.
It's one of these suspensions of disbelief you have to go with for the show to even work.