For the whaleship, you get 8 squads plus the help of a helper squad for a total of 45 girls in a team. The TP of all those girls add up to determine the Type, health, attack and defence of your whaleship. When you go out for missions the main goal of the mission is to kill the giant boss pest with the whaleship. There also moments in between your fight with the boss monster where your girls have to fight smaller versions of the boss pest; if a squad dies while fighting these pests, the next squad is sent out in the same way as when you're fighting a raid boss.

Whaleship missions reward you with whaleship medals which you can use to exchange for manyus, hearts, affection items, ampys, gold, seeds, bloom birds, 100yr old dragons and more importantly the best equips in the game. You can start whaleship missions as early as 200k+ TP as long as you have enough girls to fill the ship but I wouldn't recommend farming it for medals until your main team of 20 hits 400k+ TP.