Sunday 05 February 2012

Designing the Cetacean Ops

“Cetacean Ops” is a facility onboard the Enterprise-D that, though referred to only twice—in the episodes, “The Perfect Mate” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise”—speaks to the imagination of fans every since Rick Sternbach and Mikael Okuda described and depicted it in their Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual as containing dolphins!

It is stated in the Manual that guidance and navigation research is conducted by a cetacean crew of twelve Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus gilli) who are apparently supervised by two Takaya’s Whales (Orcinus orca takayai). The “Takaya’s Whale” is not an actual species; the name is a homage to the fictional character, “Noriko Takaya” of the Japanese animated series, Aim For The Top! Gunbuster in which “espers and electronic-brained [bottlenose] dolphins” navigate a spaceship.

According to Sternbach, Cetacean Ops was never shown, “since the expense would have been prohibitive, but we did convince the writers to have Geordi ask a visiting official if they ever saw the dolphins.” The entire facility was his idea from the start. “I’m convinced,” he writes in the Manual, “that, even if they’re not intelligent enough to pilot a starship, they can still teach us a few things about other life forms.”

Star Trek: Online

From October through December 2005, Andrew Probert, senior illustrator on Star Trek: The Next Generation, worked with the game designer and art director of Perpetual Entertainment’s Star Trek Online to design previously unseen interiors of a Galaxy class starship. The Star Trek Online project was later taken over by another company, yet Probert’s designs remain and give us a glimpse of what could have been.

Probert was asked to design the “Medical and Sciences” section of Deck 7, which featured besides several laboratories, Stellar Cartography, and an extended Medical Complex, the illustrious Cetacean Ops.

 

N. Ottens
8 May 2006
Last updated: 24 October 2008

Sources for this article include:
• Sternbach, R. & M. Okuda, Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (1991)
• “Cetacean Ops,” Memory Alpha