Where Do I Find the Dolphins?
![Enterprise-D Cetacean Ops deck plan](images/Enterprise-D-Cetacean-Ops-deck-plan.jpg)
Cetacean Ops is a facility on the Enterprise-D which, though referred to only twice — in the episodes “The Perfect Mate” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise” — has spoken to the imagination of fans ever since Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda included 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 supervised by two Takaya’s Whales (Orcinus orca takayai).
The “Takaya’s Whale” is not a real species; the name is a homage to the fictional character Noriko Takaya in the Japanese animated series Aim For The Top! Gunbuster in which “espers and electronic-brained [bottlenose] dolphins” navigate a spaceship.
According to Sternbach, the area was never shown on screen “since the expense would have been prohibitive, but we did convince the writers to have Geordi [La Forge] ask a visiting official if they ever saw the dolphins.”
![Enterprise-D Cetacean Ops concept art](images/Enterprise-D-Cetacean-Ops-concept-art.jpg)
The 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 lifeforms.”
From October through December 2005, Andrew Probert, who designed the Enterprise-D, worked with Perpetual Entertainment to imagine previously unseen interiors of a Galaxy-class starship for Star Trek Online. The project went in a different direction, but Probert’s designs still give us a glimpse of what could have been.
15 comments
Submit comments by email.