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

When fans got their first glimpse of the USS Cerritos on the Star Trek: Lower Decks teaser poster released in July of 2020, many reacted with the totally understandable, not nitpicky question: What's up with those warp nacelle pylons?

Yeah, the design of the Cerritos was a little jarring to longtime fans, but the question was somewhat reasonable. In all other Star Trek vehicles, you could easily imagine how a person could get from one part a the ship to another, but with the engineering section of the Cerritos separated from the primary hull of the ship and attached to the warp nacelles, just exactly how does the crew get to the warp core?

According to Mike McMahan via Trekyards:

The trick is that they travel through the nacelles. Travel through the struts themselves is not a big deal, but travel through the nacelles means there has to be a kind of protective layer around the turbloift shaft as it's going in there.

And what about those cutouts? Purely aesthetic or?

The cutouts are because they just don't have any use in those parts of the pylons so they're saving that space... The less space and the less material that can be vibrating, those are connective struts so really what you're doing is managing the amount of stress that's going onto the ship through these various connections and to maintain that. It's kind of like when you look at flying buttresses on a cathedral, you don't want more material, you want material in places that is gonna be the most helpful.