I walked around the aft of Spock’s shuttle to scan the port nacelle and the tricorder sees right through it from that angle.
So I walked around to the fore and tried from there, only to realize that USS Excelsior seemingly has no warp coil at all in its port nacelle!
No wonder it was having so much trouble out there…
wrong side , its the nacelle on the other side , you also have to be really close to initiate the scan
See where it says “idle” on the lower left of the tricorder screen? Sometimes that will change to “out of range” if you’re, well, it’s self explanatory. You usually need to be right on top of something to scan it.
Y’all may have misunderstood my intention in filing this bug. I didn’t have a problem completing the quest at all. I was just pointing out (partly for amusement, but mostly for accuracy’s sake) that the port nacelle (opposite of the one you start next to) doesn’t actually appear to have a warp coil in it, no matter how close you are.
I think the devs just didn’t want to confuse the player and expect the player to just scan what’s right in front of them (the starboard nacelle), not to walk around the shuttle to the other side like I did.
The starboard nacelle (the one you start by, and the one you’re supposed to scan) is there and is fine. And as you pointed out, @USSEnterprise works when you’re close enough. Initially, I was close (but not quite close enough), so I thought “well, maybe the cracks are in the OTHER nacelle…” and so I walked around.
When I realized my error, I went back to the starboard nacelle, got real close, and completed the task. It was just comical that we’re spending all this time trying to find a microscopic problem with the shuttle when by all rights it only has a single warp coil. 
Forvive my slowness but I’m stuck on this part. I’m trying to scan the starboard nacelle and virtually on top of the nacelle but nothing seems to appear and the tricorder just shows it’s idle.
Have you changed the scan settings?
