Star Trek Lower Deck - the new ship

[tezunegari]

Oy, vey.

The new ship from Star Trek Lower Decks has been revealed...
It's the top one.


The one below is my attempt to make it look somewhat good.

[Formless]

I think you might be missing the point of the design a little (okay, actually you're missing the point a lot). Lower Decks is supposed to be a comedy, they've pitched it as a comedy, the executive producer was the head writer and executive producer of Rick and Morty, and they've specifically said that this ship, the U.S.S. Cerritos, is supposed to be one of the least important in the fleet. I would suggest watching Junkball Media's breakdowns of how many of the Star Trek ships we know got designed, because many of them looked a lot sillier in their initial design phases before coming to the regal appearances we know today. In this case, however, I would bet that either they designed it to look silly right off the bat, or it started life looking more like your attempt at a redesign before being told "make it look funny!" And so they gave it legs. And everyone said "perfect."

Given the characters look like a cross between the original Animated Series and Futurama, I wouldn't expect anything less.

[tezunegari]

Why does a ship in a comedy have to look like a mentally-challenged earthworm designed it?

The Protector from Galaxy Quest is a solid design in a scifi comedy.
The Eagle-5 from Spaceballs despite being a parody of the Millennium Falcon is still a solid design.
The SCS Deepship 86 from Space Quest is a better parody on Star Trek ships while being a relatively solid design... and it's a fucking jockstrap.

The ship is plain stupid in design.

And the early designs of beloved ship designs being silly... yeah, and they got rejected until they were regal in appearance.

[Formless]

Honestly, I'm not convinced that this show is even supposed to be canon (I mean, maybe it is, but the art style...), so the real question is why bother making it look regal? The theme of the show is that these people are stuck on a boring assignment with a ship no one cares about, the tagline is literally "rarely going where no one has gone before". This isn't a hero ship, its more like the Oberth class, which also looks kinda stupid. Making it look silly plays into the theme that this isn't a glamorous assignment like the Enterprise, and I fully expect the writers will make jokes at the ship's expense, to make it clear to the audience the difference between serving on a Cerritos class ship and serving on something desirable like an Intrepid. I mean, the show is named after a classic TNG episode that follows the lives of low ranking officers so we can see how the commanding officers we usually follow appear from that perspective. This is the Lower Decks of Starfleet itself, so that will likely be the perspective of everyone, even the captain, towards Starfleet as an organization.

And if it does become a hero ship in the true sense of the word, having it look goofy would likely accentuate the idea that just being at the bottom doesn't make you unimportant, which was another theme of Lower Decks (the episode). Similarly, Barclay wasn't your typical starfleet officer, one look at him immediately made people think "what a loser". But in reality he was a highly competent engineer who just needed to work on his social skills, and that is precisely what made him endearing as a character. Same principle, but this time they are (possibly) applying it to the ship itself. Its darned goofy looking, but its made by Starfleet, so no doubt its capable.

[tezunegari]

Honestly, I'm not convinced that this show is even supposed to be canon

It's canon according to an interview.
https://trekmovie.com/2020/05/11/mike-m ... nto-canon/

If the showrunners really wanted to hammer home that "Rarely going where no one has gone before" and "this is not a hero ship" the Cerritos should look like a bargain-bin derivate of an existing design (preferably one that actually got a prominent role in an earlier show).

Making the ship look like a bad but unique kitbash to reenforce the background-ship character is kinda counterproductive because the most memorable background ships are the kitbashes.

To make the ship really just a background character of a "Hero show" it should be "unassuming and boring", my modded version does exactly that.
It's familiar enough to say "I have seen this before" yet offers enough differences to not be a Nebula or Reliant.

[Formless]

I disagree. The background characters of Lower Decks were, at the end of the day, still characters, who stood out all the more because we're primed to disregard the extras and forget that realistically speaking, they would have their own personalities and experiences. Making this ship look like a Reliant makes it blend in too well into the background, because it would have no unique character to it. You don't want it to be confused for another ship that's already been seen onscreen, you just don't want it to look like something a cadet fresh out of the academy would immediately apply for a position on, unless they were looking to avoid serving on the front lines of the Dominion war or something. Your design looks too much like a Nebula, IMO, while their design is unmistakably like a goofier variant of the Steamrunner (already a silly looking ship IMO). Only the diehard fans will remember the Steamrunner, but the Reliant was a major player in The Wrath of Khan, and many memorable episodes of TNG featured the Nebula. So while there are in fact familiar design features, no one is going to get it confused with another ship.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

My first thought was that it could comfortably fit in the background at Wolf359. My second was that it was an homage to the Explodium Oberth class. If the nacelles looked just a bit more like hilighter pens, it would be perfect.

[bilateralrope]

It looks like Starfleet had a saucer section from one ship, the drive section from another and a need to connect them together into a fully functional ship in a hurry. Then they never got round to prettying up the connecting struts because they functioned well enough.