Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Cerritos You Need To Know
3. About Those Dune Buggies
Everything about Star Trek: Lower Decks' look screams "TNG" but, in fact, the show is set in 2380, a good 15 years after The Next Generation and a year after Star Trek Nemesis. Still, the uniforms harken back to the bold colors of TNG's costumes, the Cerritos' interiors are brightly-lit à la TNG and Voyager, even the shuttles have that boxy TNG style, rather than the aerodynamic shape of the shuttles introduced in late-Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Insurrection.
Obviously, this is a production design choice intended to conjure up the warm feelings of 1990s Star Trek, you know, the days when Captain Picard AND Captain Kirk graced the cover of Time Magazine and you could easily find Commander Riker hanging on a peg at Toys R Us.
In-universe, though, there is an explanation for all this.
The Cerritos is not a flagship like the Enterprise or even moderately prestigious like the USS Vancouver, she’s a low-level starship conducting "routine" missions. The uniforms, the tricorders, even the shuttles aren't Starfleet's best. Rather than being stocked with type-9 "speedboat" shuttlecraft like Voyager or type-11 shuttles like the Enterprise-E, the Cerritos carries type-6A shuttlecraft, a spin-off of the type-6 used by the Enterprise-D some 25 years prior.
There are, however, some support craft that are up to date: the Argo dune buggies. Yes, the Cerritos has a full complement of the same dune buggy that was used in the memorable (embarrassing) action sequence in Star Trek Nemesis, because of course the Cerritos has those.