Star Trek fans have always had a special relationship with the spaceships featured in the franchise’s various series, especially when these ships are named “Enterprise”. Recently, CBS and Rod Roddenberry’s production company have published a website that should make fans very happy – the Roddenberry Archive. Here, fans can interactively explore the bridge of every Star Trek ship that has ever borne the Enterprise name. Together with the cloud rendering company OTOY, Roddenberry Entertainment has recreated 30 different bridges from the two timelines and the mirror universe of various series and films plus the bridge of the USS Voyager.
Many fans like to imagine what it would be like to sit on the bridge of their favorite Enterprise. While working, they play the sound of the warp drive in the background or design entire rooms in their apartments as replica Star Trek sets. In the Roddenberry Archive, the 3D backdrops are faithfully recreated and can be walked on freely. Detailed replicas have been created with the help of Star Trek superfans, model and set designers Doug Drexler and Denise and Michael Okuda. Michael Okuda invented Okudakram, a technique that significantly shaped the look of the LCARS computer interface of the Enterprise-D.
The archive also includes the computer voice of the LCARS interface. The voice was digitized in detail for future digital assistants before Majel Barrett’s death. She had recorded almost all the texts on the ship’s computer for the TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise series. The level of detail in the virtual replicas of the bridges in the archive is probably unsurpassed. With the exception of the toilets on the bridge deck of the Enterprise-D, everything has been meticulously recreated, even the interior of the turbo-lift cabins.
Still, the official version of the ships falls short of what Star Trek fans have been creating on their own for decades. Many fans still remember the Stage 9 fan project with nostalgia, which over several years had recreated dozens of rooms of the Enterprise-D in detail with the help of Unreal Engine 4 – with VR support! However, this project was shut down in 2018 after a legal threat brought by a lawyer from CBS television. To the disappointment of all but a few well-paid suits at CBS.
The official Enterprise bridge sets are designed so convincingly that you can almost imagine that the set designers of “Star Trek: Picard” used the virtual Enterprise D-bridge as a template for the replica scenery for the end of this series. So if you’d rather spend your next lunch break on the bridge of the Enterprise than in the office, you should drop by the Roddenberry Archive. This Linux script is for everyone who misses the right warp drive sound.
