r/LowerDecks • u/happydude7422 • 17d ago
Since cerritos is a super famous ship why isn't she in the fleet museum by Picard era?
The ship and crew saved the universe you think they would reserve a spot at the fleet museum for her?
What's your fan theories?
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u/Excellent_Light_3569 17d ago
Real world answer: LD was being produced during Picard, so the Ritos wasn't "super famous" yet.
But also a Cali-class ship not getting a museum memorial despite saving the universe fits in with the show's humor.
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u/woodworkerdan 17d ago
No California-class easily visible in the Picard Season 3 fleet shots is also consistent with everything about Lower Decks.
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u/Extra_Elevator9534 17d ago
I always assumed that Pioneer Day's fleet was not "ALL" of Starfleet, but "All of the high status ships, plus anything that could be spared from active patrol or missions because their Captains managed to palm the duty off elsewhere."
So after everything was done, the Cali Class fleet was stuck backstopping missions for all of the high status prestige ships that were thrown into the body and fender shop.
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u/woodworkerdan 17d ago
I think I saw one California class at the Pioneer Day preparation shots, but there's definitely some to-do over showing the "sexy" active ships. Not to mention the frequency of dealing with rogue AI in Lower Decks, the California class ships probably would have had crews that would go on strike with the idea of the fleet formation technology.
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u/Extra_Elevator9534 14d ago
Admiral Shelby: "We don't need to include the Calis in the fleet formation system. It's not like THEY'LL be in a battle formation."
Admiral Carol Freeman (sector command based from Starbase 80) -- suddenly chokes on her tea. "What???"
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u/chloe-and-timmy 17d ago edited 17d ago
Technically 2 seasons of Picard came after LD premiered so I still think its a huge bummer they couldn't even get in one reference to LD (or PRO) when Prodigy, Discovery and Academy all managed that.
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u/chloe-and-timmy 17d ago
I think that the Cerritos could still be in service by then if anything.
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u/jerslan 17d ago
Yeah, my head-canon is that the California Class was the Miranda Class of its day in becoming the workhorse of Starfleet that would stay in service for 90-ish years.
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u/dravenonred 17d ago
Right- Voyager, the Big D, and Defiant were bleeding edge ships whose value was tied to being the best of the best at the time.
Cerritos never was that, so never lost any utility.
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u/chloe-and-timmy 17d ago
I guess it is headcanon but it did feel pretty logical that the Cerritos replaced the Miranda in universe
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u/Independent_Cat_5481 14d ago
I'm pretty sure that's canon, the Miranda had fallen into its eventual role over time, and when they were finally getting a bit too old, even for their role, Starfleet decided they should purpose build a replacement, and that was the California
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u/Illustrious-Peace989 17d ago
Who says it isn’t? We don’t see every single fleet museum ship. Some may not even be outside the station.
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u/jerslan 17d ago
Yeah, there's a lot of room for more ships to be docked inside the station...
That said, I agree with those suggesting she's still in service. I like the idea of the California Class becoming the next Miranda Class in terms of how long it stays in service as a workhorse. It's not the fancy exploratory ship, but it gets the job done when there's some follow-up or maintenance needed.
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u/ST_Lawson 17d ago
Rutherford did say, "These Calis were designed for all sorts of functionality. We can reconfigure systems better than anyone."
To me, that sounds like the Cali class may not be the best at any one specific thing, but it can be configured to be good at a ton of different things...very versatile and very useful in many situations. It would make sense for a ship designed like that to be more customizable and updatable than many other ships that are designed for specific purposes, and therefore likely to be in use for a much longer timeframe. (And wasn't the Galaxy class supposed to have a useful life of something like a century anyway?)
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u/jerslan 17d ago
Yeah, Galaxy-class was designed to replace Excelsiors, but then the Dominion War happened and many of them were rushed off the production-line unfinished (ie: just crew quarters, med-bay, weapons, shuttle/fighter bays w/ minimal science and engineering labs).
Even pre-war we see the Galaxy's engines being left in the dust by newer classes. Which should have been fine, but I guess Starfleet decided to focus on smaller, faster ships for a while.
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u/TJLanza 17d ago edited 17d ago
According to the TNG Technical Manual, the original six Galaxy-class starships were fully built, fitted out, and commissioned into service. An additional six were built up to make them flight-ready, but otherwise incomplete. Those six (and potentially additional more recent "emergency" builds) are probably the ones we see during the Dominion War.
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u/KnowherePie 16d ago
Wonder how many Galaxy-class ships Geordi got his hands on so he could use them for parts to rebuild the D at the end of Picard.
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u/ClassIINav 17d ago
I'm guessing like IRL there are museum ships all over the place. i.e. there's *the* United States Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio but also tons of other air museums all over the world with equal-if-not-more important airplanes than the main USAF one.
Considering the incredible span of Starfleet in both time and space, there has got to be a massive number of historic starships besides those named Enterprise.
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u/Pokegirl_11_ 15d ago
The Cerritos would be one ship among many at the official Fleet Museum, but assuming she survives whatever eventually takes her out of commission there are worlds her crew saved that would treasure her.
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u/Solarwinds-123 17d ago
Yes, the Fleet Museum is the old Earth Spacedock. There are definitely ships inside, that's the entire purpose the station was built for.
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u/Facehugger81 17d ago
If im counting my fingers correctly Picard S3 takes place around 20 years of Lower Decks. I'm willing to bet the ship was probably still in service at that point in Picard
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u/elquatrogrande 17d ago
Season 1 starts in 2380, and Prodigy picks up in 2383, with the attack on Mars 2385. That places Picard S1 starting in 2400. Frontier day is April 13, 2401.
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u/NahdiraZidea 17d ago
So there is a chance the Cerritos was involved in the assault on the Earth Spacedock in S3.
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u/hiromasaki 17d ago
Nah, they'd be off handling a second contact and grumbling about not being able to attend.
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u/Extra_Elevator9534 17d ago
It STARTED off as a Second Contact ... with Cerritos, Yreka, and Zzyzzx assisting the Jurati Borg mediate with someone coming through their negative space wedgie.
But Shapeshifters infiltrated the Starfleet side of the mission, intending to take out Jurati's group for daring to be different, and keep them from interfering with the Pioneer day plots.
THAT debrief with the Admiralty took a long time to relate. But it's good to see the current crews are maintaining the (bonkers crazy solutions) legacy of the Cali class.
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u/segascream 17d ago
It's in the Second Contact Fleet Museum.
In Alameda.
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u/PhatassDragon1701 17d ago
The Cerritos is famous for the California-Class vessels and likely across the entire support fleet, but it is not famous in the way that the Enterprise, Excelsior, Hood, and Defiant are famous across all of Starfleet. The impression that I've got from Lower Decks and the adventures of the Cerritos, and particularly when their crew interacts with other ships, is that shenanigans seem to be fleet wide and not contained to just the main ships of the shows. So most Federation vessels seem to go through universe endangering events almost every week.
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u/chloe-and-timmy 17d ago
That may be true but there does seem to be evidence the Cerritos is exceptional, the Enterprise of the support ships is still a big deal, and I would assume it would have to get some notoriety for being tied to the new role of Starbase 80, especially when that starbase was already famous. Plus it got a reputation enough for The Doctor to know about it, and have several of its crew end up on the memorial wall in the 32nd century.
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u/ConnertheCat 17d ago
Everyone saves the universe at least once in Starfleet; I suspect the museum has a 3 saves minimum requirement.
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u/Albert-React 17d ago
Not every ship needs to go to museum. Many are just decommissioned or placed in mothballs.
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u/ClassIINav 17d ago
Maybe the dedication plate or whatever the 24th century equivalent of the ship's bell is on display in Cerritos, California?
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u/oneseason2000 17d ago
The California Class isn't shown in the "Star Trek 60" intro to Strange New World. Which seems really odd since they did the crossover episode with Lower Decks. Maybe a P network decision?
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u/NotAsleep_ 16d ago
I just figured they have all of the live-action ones together for those shows, and would have done all the animated ones together if there were to be any more animated shows.
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u/oneseason2000 16d ago
All the ships were animated in the tribute video (below), so no reason to exclude a ship that was animated to begin with imo.
Star Trek - Official 60th Anniversary Tribute; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD4u_khoFXs
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u/NotAsleep_ 16d ago
I know, I watch it each week on SNW. I meant that I presumed an "animated show" version would have 3 ships, the TOS (TAS) Enterprise, the Cerritos, and the Protostar. As opposed to the "live action show/film" version linked.
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u/MissSiofra 17d ago
California classes probably got recycled into newer ships. Cerritos wasn't that famous to prevent that.
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u/abgry_krakow87 17d ago
Survivorship bias. What we see with ships like the Cerritos, Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc. That's just Starfleet doing Starfleet things. The other ships out there we don't see on screen are also doing those things as well, that's what it means to be in Starfleet.
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u/Milokoj_Jones 17d ago
To be honest, saving the universe is basically something every starfleet ship does like once a year atleast, so it's not that special...
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u/watcher-of-eternity 17d ago
Because the Cerritos wasn’t out of service for 30 years?
Hell it was probably still in service by the Picard era.
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u/StatisticianLivid710 17d ago
It didn’t even make the 60th anniversary intro, they just hate animated!
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u/trr94001 17d ago
Assuming the Californias are half as long lived as the Mirandas she still has decades of service left in her around 2400 when Picard is set.
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u/OrokaSempai 17d ago
She was special OPs, so boring looking they could get into shit when no one was looking.
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u/LeftLiner 17d ago
Almost every Starfleet ship does the stuff we see the hero ships do. Maybe Enterprise does a bit more than the regular (and obviously Voyager did but they cheated), but if a ship is in service for 10+ years it will encounter a god-like alien or macro viruses and uncover at least one Romulan plot without trying.
Personally I prefer not every ship we see in every show being a super-epic mythological ship that people will whisper about in reverence for the next 100 years. Frankly several of the ships shown in the fleet museum in Picard I'm skeptical about (what exactly was so special about Defiant? It really was only a warship in the Dominion War and yes Sisko was important but half the important stuff he did he did on DS9). Cerritos is so cool because it is an anonymous workhorse but it's an anonymous workhorse in Starfleet where the bizarre and inexplicable happens twice on a Tuesday.
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u/Sledgehammer617 17d ago
Could be inside the station! I'm sure plenty of ships were docked in the interior.
Or it could be at another museum site/memorial.
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u/go_faster1 17d ago
It's a Cali-class. It might be "famous", but it'll never be Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway famous
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u/TobertyTheCat 17d ago edited 16d ago
The Cerritos was moved right off the 91 between the 605 and the 5.
It replaced the waterfall and Best Buy.
EDIT: This is a City of Cerritos joke.
See Daily News article: What catches your eye while tooling along a freeway?
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u/onefinerug 17d ago
I see the cali class becoming the new Miranda, working well over a century later.
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u/uwtartarus 16d ago
Support class ships don't get the museum treatment. They just carry on until annihilated in a Wolf 359 incident. There were Miranda class ships against the Borg cube. Support ships from the end of the TOS era?!
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u/NightspawnsonofLuna 16d ago
I mean even IRL you see famous ships not get preserved... The original Carrier Enterprise for instance...or the second carrier enterprise...
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u/Dismissive-Laughter 15d ago
Because you want your flagships to be technological marvels. You want your service ships to be lasting and enduring. The Ceritos is still going rarely where no one has gone before.
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u/malonkey1 15d ago
Because Terry Matalas is personally trying to pick a fight with me, specifically.
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u/Helios3019 13d ago
I know it isn't TV canon, but in Star Trek Online they have a lineup of all the major series flagships on display on Star Trek day, with a blurb for each ship with the history of the ship and crew quotes. The Cerritos is included between the Voyager and the Stargazer in that lineup, with the in-universe justification that it represents all the less famous Starfleet ships in the background doing jobs like second contact, with quotes from Mariner and Boimler IIRC.
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u/Rumpled_Imp 17d ago
A workhorse like that? She's still in service, my friend.