Crawler
The CRAWLER or Critical All-Terrain Wheeled Laboratory Exploration Rescue Shelter is a multipurpose ground vehicle used by Starfleet for critical mission applications.
The vehicle was designed to fulfill a large number of rolls for the fleet, amongst them disaster recovery, exploration, mobile laboratory, emergency shelter, and conventional transport.
The vehicle is designed to operate in places where transporters or other types of transport is not feasible, where infrastructure is destroyed, remote or underdeveloped or when autonomous laboratory, housing or unconventional transport is required.
The Vehicle is actually two vehicles in one, the first, is a smaller single or two man scouting vehicle that can be used for personal conveyance, scouting, or route determination of a convoy. The second is the transport configuration.
The means of converting from one configuration to the next is shown in the illustration below.
In scout mode, the vehicle is capable of high speed maneuvering, and is designed with multi-wheel drive and independent suspension. The vehicle is air tight and contains it's own environmental systems. It is equipped with a variety of sensors, which allow it to operate as a remote sensor platform for any number of potential missions.
The mission module, is capable of a variety of applicable mission package configurations. Among them is medical isolation, medical laboratory, medical ward, science laboratory, sensor pallets, cargo space, emergency housing, support barracks, unit transport, tankage, expedition housing, personnel transport, mobile power stations, replicator stations, transporter hubs, and strategic operations support.
During the rebuilding stage following the Federation Civil War, critical supplies were shipped into remote ares, where transporters could not be used, and the empty containers converted to emergency storage, medical facilities and mobile replicator and supply depots. The units can be interlinked to provide a near infinite combination of uses, and entire towns sprung up in hard hit areas, built entirely of these units.
Later additional modules were developed to aid peacekeeping forces as command centers, detention areas, exploration vehicles, and mobile medical and scientific facilities.
In 2414, the USS Rosenante used crawlers to conduct ice core and exploration surveys on Solyon, the Rogue Planet that threatened to destroy Asrai Prime.
The CRAWLER was first seen in the USS Rosenante Mission The Third Law
