Sometimes I discover a website or app that I know is going to suck up hours or even days of my life and immediately have to close it or else I’ll not get any work done. That’s exactly what happened when I stumbled upon the new official website that lets you freely explore every Enterprise bridge that has appeared over the decades of Star Trek movies and TV shows. But then I remembered I can explore it for work reasons, so here we are!
This new web portal, launched on April 27, was created as a collaboration between the Roddenberry Estate, the Roddenberry Archive, and tech company OTOY. It went live shortly after the series finale of Star Trek: Picard aired on Paramount+ and spoiler warning, it does feature some information from that show that you might want to avoid if you’ve not seen the recent season. The digital recreations were approved and “overseen” by well-known Star Trek artists, including Denise and Michael Okuda—the authors of The Star Trek Encyclopedia—Daren Dochterman, Doug Drexler, and Dave Blass as explained in a blog post from OTOY.
While the portal is filled with a lot of information about the various Enterprise starships that have appeared in the show and movies, the real star here is the ability to explore digitally recreated bridges of nearly every variant, including some that never actually existed. For example, you can poke around a surprisingly detailed 3D version of the bridge that would have appeared in the never-produced Star Trek Phase II, a sequel series to the original show that was canned after Paramount’s then-plans for a TV network launched alongside the show fizzled out.
What details you can spot in the digital Star Trek bridges
And if you dig around enough, you’ll also discover alternate reality Enterprises that only appeared in one episode and the ships from the J.J. Abrams films aka the Kelvin timeline. There’s even a really well-made Voyager bridge tossed in there, too. Like I said earlier, you could (and I probably will) spend far too much time virtually touring each and every ship bridge available through this awesome website.
I also love that you can right-click to zoom in on anything and read all the text on the various panels and computers in each bridge. Not only that, but many of the bridges include interactive doors, panels, and chairs. Yes, you can sit in the captain’s chair. And using that zoom feature, you can glare at the viewscreen as if some evil alien had just threatened your crew. Feel free to yell “Red Alert” or “Engage” if you want to. I know I did.
One thing to keep in mind: Some folks have reported technical issues or bugs while using the site. I’m using Google Chrome and haven’t run into any issues yet, but for some of you, it might not be smooth sailing depending on your device or browser.