LOWER DECKS Roundup: McMahan Talks Cerritos Starship Design, Starfleet Recruitment Posters, and a New Visit to THE READY ROOM

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LOWER DECKS Roundup: McMahan Talks Cerritos Starship Design, Starfleet Recruitment Posters, and a New Visit to THE READY ROOM

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Star Trek: Lower Decks has finally warped into North America, and as the new animated series launches today, there’s a few news bits that we wanted to shine a spotlight on before the next mission of the new crew!

As the hours approached last night’s debut of Lower Decks, the official Star Trek social media team released a four-part series of Starfleet recruitment posters to highlight starship life for new officers in the fleet — giving Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi each a chance to be the face of the ‘fleet.

You can find larger versions of each poster in our growing Lower Decks image gallery.

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The yellow-striped, California-class USS Cerritos. (CBS All Access)

Series showrunner Mike McMahan spoke with the How to Kill an Hour podcast earlier this week, and as part of his discussion he expanded upon the look and design of the California-class starship at the center of the series: the USS Cerritos.

The ship is in great condition. It’s a California-class ship, which has always existed in Starfleet — [this is] what we’re saying — that they’re the utility support ships. In the California-class [line], there are three types of hull painting: there’s blue, red, and yellow.

We’ve extended the visual metaphor of the uniforms to the ships, and the Cerritos has yellow on the hull because it’s primarily a second contact engineering ship. They show up to planets that need engineering stuff done on them in order to be able to communicate with the Federation.

There’s also, you’ll see in the show, blue-hulled California class ships, which are usually deployed to places where there has to be more medical expertise, and red-hulled ships that are like for moving around ambassadors and doing more command-level stuff.

A front view of the Cerritos, inspired by the Miranda-class USS Reliant. (CBS All Access)

The actual design for the Cerritos, which is our lead ship, is directly inspired by my favorite Starfleet ship — the Reliant from ‘The Wrath of Khan.’ I just love the look of that ship. I wanted to take the Reliant and then put it into a version of the ‘Next Gen’ look of ships — and then on top of that, it’s a support ship so it can’t look as cool as all the other ships. It can’t be as easy to get around in it.

I’m surprised by how many people online were like, “Well, wait a minute, engineering section is removed and put in between the nacelles?” It’s like, guys, there were diagonal turbolifts in the Enterprise-D. Have you guys not been looking at the schematics of the Enterprise D?! Because we have been!

Also, as my wife — who saw some of those tweets — rolled her eyes and said, “Why are they not knowing that there are diagonal turbolifts on this ship? There’s diagonal elevators at the Luxor in Las Vegas. They think the Luxor has better technology than a Starfleet ship?”

A composite of the Cerritos’ master situation display monitor from ‘Second Contact.’ (CBS All Access)

Listen, I love the internet. It’s a hive mind where everybody who knows more than me is getting together and trying to make sure that everything is stress checked. But when it comes to the ship, we had many hundreds of designs that we whittled down to exactly what I wanted.

I wanted the nacelles to be shaped more squarely than the smooth lines of the Enterprise-D’s nacelles. And I also didn’t want it to look [like the ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’-era] NX-class where it was funky and early, and I didn’t want it look like a Sovereign-class, which is all fancy and shiny.

I wanted it to look a little more like a standard season four, season five TNG-era ship. So it has fewer decks, but it’s still a fully functioning Starfleet ship. It has a full crew. And I don’t want to spoil anything… but we do visit some parts of the ship that we’ve always heard about but never seen before.

One of those never-seen places may be the long-joked-about Cetacean Ops laboratory, introduced in the Next Generation Technical Manual and the expanded Enterprise-D Blueprints, as discussed in this week’s new edition of The Ready Room, where host Wil Wheaton interviewed McMahan following the overnight debut of Lower Decks.

Mike McMahan: “We’re all obsessed with Cetacean Ops; we love that it exists. We’re breaking a story now for the second season where we’re like, ‘Is this it? Is the one where we finally go to Cetacean Ops?’ Because a lot of our characters talk about Cetacean Ops, and sometimes enter a scene wet — but we never actually get to go into Cetacean Ops [in Season 1].

I’m dying to go into Cetacean Ops but it’s got to be worth it. It’s got to be for a good reason.”

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns next Thursday with “Envoys” on CBS All Access, CTV Sci Fi, and Crave.

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