If you’ve ever wanted to walk the decks of the United Federation Starship Enterprise, and you don’t happen to live near the Star Trek Tour in Ticonderoga, New York, you’re probably out of luck – unless you can do it in virtual reality, Fortunately, these days, our personal computers are becoming powerful enough so that many of us can.

Behold the Stage 9 VR walkthrough environment. It’s a loving and exacting recreation of the Enterprise D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, built using the popular Unreal4 game engine. It features a number of the shooting sets as seen on the show. The detail is astonishing, right down to the texture in the carpeting. The audio environments are all there too, and this newest iteration of the simulator features nonplayer characters, or NPC’s, that make the ship feel alive.

Here is The XP Gamers video walkthrough:

The developer, “Rob”, is one of those rare individuals who is good with not only code but 3D asset creation as well, and he really really knows the Enterprise.

Here are the rooms he has done so far:

  • Main Bridge
  • Ready Room
  • Observation Lounge
  • Ten Forward and Crew Lounge
  • Battle Bridge
  • Stage 9 corridor section
  • Sickbay
  • Dr Crushers’ Office
  • Data’s Quarters
  • Picard’s Quarters
  • Holodeck
  • Transporter Rooms 1 & 2
  • Main Engineering with warp core
  • Starboard Nacelle Control
  • Astrometrics
  • Shuttle Bay 2

Not very many of the control panels are interactive yet. Here are the things we tried in the video above that actually worked:

  • Main Bridge: you can fire a photon torpedo and watch Terok Nor spectacularly explode
  • Shuttle Bay 2: you can open the shuttle bay door, drop the force field and watch the cargo get sucked out into space (spoiler: nobody dies, and you can actually walk out onto the vast outer hull of the Enterprise a short distance)
  • Starboard Nacelle Control: you can open the access door for the primary plasma duct and gaze down the inside of the starboard nacelle
  • Battle Bridge: you can initiate saucer separation and watch the entire sequence on the main display there

Some of the decks are quite extensive, and everything is so finely detailed that you’ll do double-takes.

There are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, in both stereo VR and non-VR versions – including one that works with Google Cardboard and runs on your smart phone.

For the desktop computer versions, you’re going to need some serious hardware to run them. We used an Nvidia 1060ti with an i5 processor and 24 Gb of RAM. The specifications on the web site specify 32Gb for running the demo, but ours appeared to run fine with 8Gb less RAM than that.

Visit the download page – there’s sure to be a version you can run, and it’s being constantly updated, so there are new features being added to it every few months.

-30-

 

 

 

 

SCIFI Radio Staff

SCIFI Radio Staff

SCIFI.radio is listener supported sci-fi geek culture radio, and operates almost exclusively via the generous contributions of our fans via our Patreon campaign. If you like, you can also use our tip jar and send us a little something to help support the many fine creatives that make this station possible.