Star Trek Now Lets You Tour Every Enterprise Bridge, See It Here
The Roddenberry Archive now features virtual tours of Starfleet vessel bridges.
Now that the most recent season of Picard is over, Star Trek fans have witnessed the inevitable: the christening of a new Enterprise, with a crew that includes Seven of Nine as Captain and Jack Crusher as a newly-minted ensign. Around here, we’re really crossing our fingers that Paramount will finally confirm a Star Trek: Legacy series with the new ship and crew. If you’re sick of waiting to see this new Enterprise in action, though, you can beam over to the Roddenberry Archive to virtually tour every Enterprise you’ve seen (and a few you haven’t).
For old-school Star Trek fans, the ability to explore every single Enterprise bridge is kind of like having a version of the old ‘90s Interactive Technical Manual on steroids. From the bottom of the screen, you simply select which ship you’d like to check out. You’ll then see a static shot of the chosen ship in the upper right and its bridge tour in the upper left, which you can either let automatically move or take control of with your mouse.
Obviously, most Star Trek fans immediately choose their favorite Enterprise (which usually comes down to whether you grew up watching William Shatner as Kirk or Patrick Stewart as Picard). Interestingly, though, there are multiple versions of many of these ships. This lets you see some of your favorite Star Trek vessels before and after they had refits, for example, or just explore some of the differences (some major, some minor) between bridges that we see across different episodes.
As for the Star Trek lovers in this office, we had the most fun exploring the various Enterprise ships that we never got to officially see in a TV show or movie. For example, after you get done gawking at the Enterprise from Strange New Worlds, you can check out the ship designed for Planet of the Titans, which was meant to be the first movie based on The Original Series. Sure, the bridge is pretty basic, but this gives us our closest look yet at the early ship design concepts that were later used to design the Discovery.
Similarly, inquisitive Star Trek fans can also explore the Enterprise bridge that was designed for Star Trek: Phase II. This was going to be the first live-action sequel series to The Original Series that brought back all of the crew (minus Leonard Nimoy’s Spock), but the show got scrapped after the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars convinced Paramount to branch the franchise into movies. If that’s not enough, you can also explore ships from the Kelvin timeline, the Mirror Universe, and alternate realities.
For Star Trek fans who scroll all the way through the list of Enterprise ships, there is an unexpected bonus: the chance to view the bridge of the Voyager before it got stranded in the Delta Quadrant. We know that the Roddenberry Archive is working on creating other virtual projects, and the presence of Voyager here may indicate that in the future, we can tour the bridges of other ships like the Defiant and the Discovery. For the moment, though, you’ll find us touring the Enterprise-G and trying to make a Star Trek: Legacy show happen through sheer force of will.
