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In the most recent episode S02E12 of Star Trek: Discovery, we saw that

Spock beamed a person from space to a Shuttle using the Shuttle itself.

Pay attention: There's no transporter pad available on either side which seems rather advanced capability to be handled from a Shuttle.

Have we seen transportation capability of a Shuttle before?

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  • Just off the top of my head, in Timescape some crew members beam from a shuttle to the frozen-in-time Enterprise. I guess maybe Next Gen shuttles have transporter pads, but maybe the pads are a safety feature rather than a requirement. Apr 9, 2019 at 13:21
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    @PaulD.Waite That episode saw the DS9 runabouts make their way back to TNG. Those were a small starship, rather than a shuttle
    – Machavity
    Apr 9, 2019 at 13:47
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    @Machavity: Ah, right right. The entire DS9 ops crew went to the Gamma Quadrant in a runabout once I think. Literally no idea where they all slept. Apr 9, 2019 at 14:12

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In TOS era, no. The original series was going to have shuttlecraft only, and so we saw shuttles OR transporters, but not both. TNG saw shuttles evolve to become more like ships in that regard. TNG era (Type 7 shuttles) had the shuttle escape transporter

The shuttle escape transporter was a small short-range personnel transporter used aboard Federation shuttles. This transporter was manually controlled from a control console set in the ceiling of the passenger compartment of a shuttle.

In official canon, that's the first time we see a shuttle use its transporter.

How did Spock's shuttle get one? Just because they weren't previously depicted doesn't mean they didn't have one

The best take is to assume that in-universe, the technology is the same, but the original series lacked the budget to portray it as it "really was". Look at the difference in the tech between the pilot and the first episode - the "lasers" became phasers, and the communicators got a lot more sleek. An in-universe reason for that isn't necessarily needed - you can imagine that the design from TOS is what they used in the pilot, and that the look of the tech in Discovery is what the tech should look like in TOS.

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