So im watching a tos episode and the away team can’t contact the ship and the ship is drawn away from the planet. Now I recall this as sorta a common plot device in star trek. communication is not always blocked but basically the ship has to leave the away team on a plane to deal with something. Here is the thing. Why don’t they ever launch a shuttle to stay at the planet. I mean maybe more than one. This is especially true come tng where the shuttles I think tend to have transporters. I mean feels like a no brainer to me.
Not sure about all the cases, but sometimes the ship has to exit toute de suite, or has to maintain its shields, or sometimes (like in “Gallileo Seven”) the shuttle is already launched and is now missing. Or like you say communication is blocked, or Kirk & crew are being spoofed by their captors, or the Enterprise is still powerless to act via semi-weekly Q-like entity of choice.
I’m not sure TOS’ show bible has ever been published, but I’m guessing Rodenberry wrote some guidelines about such shuttle-use. Pretty much every single outsider’s script had to be cleaned up in accordance with said bible, even when they knew the guidelines going in.
But the bottom line to me is that like 99% of TV fare, TOS was designed to get the most out of it’s minutes, its actors, its scripts and so forth. If sending out an extra shuttle(s) didn’t work story-wise, then it would have been shut down as a possibility, just like countless other aspects of the show.