Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Cerritos You Need To Know

At around 20 decks tall, the USS Cerritos is much smaller than your average Enterprise (D or E), with most of the interior volume located within the 11 deck saucer. However, the Cerritos' engineering section (located in the small pod set between the ship's underslung warp nacelles) is surprisingly large for a ship of that size and era, reminiscent of the oversized engine rooms of the Kelvin Timeline films and Star Trek: "bigger on the inside" Discovery.

Speaking to Trekyards, Mike McMahan explained that the large scale engineering and warp core aren't simply visual flourishes, but technical details worked out by the production team:

The big thing we were thinking about when we were first designing why we put the engineering pod down there is, because it's a smaller ship, you don't want everybody crowded up against the warp core... The warp bubble can be extended and the deflector dish can be extended, the duties of that can be extended around the entire ship because it's a much smaller ship with a pretty hefty warp core. Because, when you're doing engineering stuff, you need to be able to have power. Now that power might not translate all the time to being the fastest or strongest ship in the fleet, but when you need to set up a power grid on a planet that you're doing second contact on... you need to be able to access greater power.