Take Virtual Tours of Every Star Trek Enterprise Bridge: A New Interactive Web Portal Created by The Roddenberry Archive

It’s a rare young Star Trek fan indeed who does­n’t fan­ta­size about sit­ting on the bridge of the star­ship Enter­prise. That has gone for every gen­er­a­tion of fan, every Star Trek series, and every Enter­prise, whose bridges you can see in the new video above from the Rod­den­ber­ry Archive. It begins, nat­u­ral­ly, with the orig­i­nal Star Trek, the show with which cre­ator Gene Rod­den­ber­ry start­ed it all — and for which art direc­tor Matt Jef­feries designed a bridge that would become a mod­el not just for all sub­se­quent Enter­pris­es, but real-life com­mand cen­ters as well. As the nar­ra­tor says, “Jef­feries’ bridge made such an impres­sion that engi­neers from NASA, the U.S. Navy, and pri­vate indus­try have stud­ied it as a mod­el for an advanced, effi­cient con­trol room.”

That nar­ra­tor hap­pens to be John de Lan­cie, whom view­ers of Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion and sub­se­quent series will know as the all-pow­er­ful extra-dimen­sion­al being Q. He’s not the only famil­iar per­former to par­tic­i­pate in this ret­ro­spec­tive project: in the video above appears a cer­tain William Shat­ner, who as James Tiberius Kirk occu­pied the cap­tain’s chair of the very first Enter­prise.

Even those who pre­fer the lat­er, more com­plex Star Treks have sure­ly won­dered what that posi­tion would feel like, and now they can get a vir­tu­al sense of it at the Rod­den­bery Archive’s web site, which is now offer­ing vir­tu­al tours of the bridge of every series’ cen­tral ship.

“The site fea­tures 360-degree, 3D mod­els of the var­i­ous ver­sions of the Enter­prise, as well as a time­line of the ship’s evo­lu­tion through­out the franchise’s his­to­ry,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Fans of the show can also read detailed infor­ma­tion about each ver­sion of the ship’s design, its sig­nif­i­cance to the Star Trek sto­ry­line and its pro­duc­tion back­sto­ry.” All this comes online to mark the end of Star Trek: Picard, the recent series built around Patrick Stew­art’s Enter­prise cap­tain from The Next Gen­er­a­tion, whose final episode went up last month on the stream­ing ser­vice Para­mount+. For that grand finale, pro­duc­tion design­er Dave Blass “recre­at­ed the bridge of the Enter­prise D,” and “Picard’s tri­umphant return to his beloved ship brought nos­tal­gic tears to the eyes of more than a few fans,” no doubt regard­less of gen­er­a­tion. Take the vir­tu­al tours here.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Star Trek Con­tin­ues: The Crit­i­cal­ly-Acclaimed, Fan-Made Sequel to the Orig­i­nal TV Series

Watch Star Trek: New Voy­ages: The Orig­i­nal Fan-Made Sequel to the 1960s TV Series

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek Fan & Advi­sor

William Shat­ner Nar­rates Space Shut­tle Doc­u­men­tary

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Star Trek: World-Build­ing Over Gen­er­a­tions — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #42

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.