scout ship n.

The news came to us by a small scout ship attached to that unhappy world.

Instead of patrolling a certain volume of space, each scout ship takes up a fixed post just inside the outer detector zone.

He had half expected the spy to land on Mars, on the principle that internment was better than annihilation, but when the plotting room brought the news that the little scout ship was heading for Phobos, he felt completely baffled.

They know we are here—either from watching us land a couple of hours ago or from observing Tom’s scout[-]ship—or they do not know we are here.

He had come running back to the scout ship, breathless and terrified, screaming, ‘Take off! The planet’s full of monsters!’

The shuttlecraft hangar was filled with the normal complement of offship Starfleet vehicles. There was a small, superfast scout ship, a heavily armored landing vehicle for worlds with surfaces even more inhospitable than the one rumored to, be revolving beneath them, and a hovercraft for those planets with totally antagonistic surfaces, or even none at all.

In the year 1830, after the formation of Starways Congress, a robot scout ship sent a report by ansible: The planet it was investigating was well within the parameters for human life.

The brain/brawn scout ship is too claustrophobic and limited. I like dealing with a lot of people.

It boasted a crew of just five apart from its captain and was rotund and slow, but was—for some reason lost in the mists of Dweller military logic—still registered as an uncommitted privateer scout ship and so cleared to make her way within the war zone and, one might hope, liable to pass any consequent challenge save one conducted by opening fire prior to negotiations.

Our ancestors had drones! They had shuttles, scoutships, survival suits. They had computers! And most of it is just sitting out there, where it got crashed by the weather, or the wildlife.