Below Deck with Lower Decks: California-Class Ships

We hear the food is better.

By StarTrek.com Staff

StarTrek.com

This week on Star Trek: Lower Decks, we learned what is likely the most important fact about the U.S.S. Cerritos and her Starfleet commissioned sisters — Mexican food, it’s better on California-class ships.

These ships, all named after California cities and places, apparently have the mess hall and replicator hookup, but what else should we know about the Cerritos, Merced, and other ships of the line?

StarTrek.com

On the How to Kill an Hour podcast, series creator and showrunner Mike McMahan shared a bit more about the Cerritos’ design and inspiration.

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.

Mike McMahan

In addition, fans have probably already started taking stock of the ship’s many features, including a crew bar, holodeck, and squash courts. On the same podcast, McMahan also spoke about one of the Cerritos’ most unique feature — diagonal turbo lifts.

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?

Mike McMahan

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This article was originally published on August 28, 2020.

Star Trek: Lower Decks streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. and is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution. In Canada, it airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel. The series will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in the UK, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Italy, France, the Caribbean, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and South Korea.