While I obviously love the vehicle designs of Star Wars, there are things about Star Trek that I find fascinating from a design perspective. And then there’s Lower Decks. That one just hit different.
Our family completely fell in love with the Cerritos crew and their ship. It’s both quirky and capable—fitting perfectly into the Star Trek universe while still feeling totally unique.
As Season 5 came to a close, I wanted to honor that crew by building a model of their ship. I up-detailed it ever so slightly to make it feel as real to me as the show did, but not so much that it lost its cartoon charm.
I tried to capture the nuance of the design—like the way they use forced perspective in the nacelles to make it feel faster. I also prefer the detailing on the aft side of the engineering deck from Season 1. And while I get why they removed the two rows of windows across the tail, I felt it looked better with at least some detail in their place.
The actual lower decks are supposed to seem undesirable, but I can’t imagine a better place to be than nestled between the two impulse drives, looking out over the engineering bay with the universe in our wake.
Some details don’t scale well in reality. For example, the escape pods end up being about 75% the size of their Intrepid- and Sovereign-class counterparts when sized to match their on-screen reference. Some of this might be due to the scale change after Season 1—originally, the ship was said to be 794 meters long, but that was later reduced in canon.
This isn’t goodbye—just a farewell for now. We hope to see you again in a future series or a triumphant return to Lower Decks. Godspeed, Cerritos and crew.
The full-scale 535.2 meter model can be found here on GrabCAD.
**Thanks NASA for the awesome star images.
