Three Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) fans are on a mission to restore a "fully functional" official replica of the Enterprise-D bridge. The group calls itself "The New Starship," and it's set to launch an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign on Wednesday. TNS seeks $175,000 to bring the bridge to life—complete with a viewscreen, the captain's chair, and even operational touchscreen computers.

As most Trekkies will remember, the original bridge used in the filming of TNG was actually destroyed during the filming of Star Trek: Generations, where the Enterprise crash-lands onto the surface of Veridian III. Following the conclusion of the show and the related films, three replicas were made with construction overseen by the show's set designers, Herman Zimmerman and Michael Okuda.

This bridge, currently in pieces, is one of those replicas built for Star Trek: The Experience, a theme-park in Las Vegas that was closed in 2008 after a 10-year run. SEE Global Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based company behind the Experience, did not respond to requests for comment.

"$175,000 will get the bridge completely restored and will give us a place to put it," Huston Huddleston, one of the group’s founders, told Ars on Tuesday. "That will get us at least a few of the computers going. And up until now, everybody’s been doing everything for free—I don't want people going broke on this. Fandom is fandom, but people have to eat and live."

The group says its "prime directive" is to "take what we have and restore it to the closest recreation of the TV [set] as possible, with the help of our highly skilled group of Hollywood professionals, and make it open to the public for meetings, movie showings, fundraisers, tours, filming, anything!"

CBS, which owns the rights to the Star Trek franchise, also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

"It's very ambitious," Okuda wrote in an e-mail sent to Ars. "I don't know how much of the original exhibition they have and how much would need to be built from scratch."



A durable replica

Huston Huddleston, one of the three members of The New Starship, explained that this bridge was made of fiberglass and plexiglass, rather than wood.

"The bridge was made right after the original bridge was blown up and they made three bridges—two for Vegas Experience and ours," he said. "The ones in Vegas, they made out of all wood roofs, it was made to stay, not to move."

"Ours was made of fiberglass and plexiglass and metal, and it [was designed] to be taken apart and put back together," Huddleston added.

"They put it on display in Hollywood for a very short time. Then in the early 2000s, they brought it to Hyde Park in London, and then they made a second one. That one went to Singapore, and [was later] destroyed. Ours went back to Hollywood. It was at this warehouse for who knows how many years—five at least. It was just on the side of the building. They didn’t even care to shelter it. All the pieces, including the chair, the consoles, everything was trashed."

Huddleston explained that for now, the bridge isn’t much to look at, as its components are currently spread between southern California and Colorado, where one of the New Starship trio lives. Rusty Harrell lives in Aurora, Colorado and is currently working on restoring the captain’s chair, as well as the Ops station where Data used to sit. The third member of the group, Brian Uiga, also lives in Southern California.



Devotion to detail

Huddleston, a self-described "total Star Trek geek," said he knew someone who used to work at Paramount, Star Trek’s home production studio. Sometimes, they would supply him with various pieces of Trek gear such as starship model blueprints.

"One day he told me he was leaving and I said: ‘Crap, now I’ll never get to turn my living room into the bridge of the Enterprise.’ And he said: ‘Be careful what you wish for,’" Huddleston recalled.

Last year, Huddleston arranged to "rescue" the set from a Los Angeles-area warehouse. He's spent the bulk of the last year getting blessings and permissions from the Star Trek family, including former cast members and Rod Roddenberry, the son of original Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. He launched the group’s Facebook page about two weeks ago.

"I paid money to just have it shipped to my house—it was two full moving vans worth of stuff," Huddleston said. "It’s not just the ceiling pieces, it’s the metal that holds it up, the wall. It took at least a couple days to move it all here."

The bridge, when fully assembled, is quite large: 35 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 11 feet tall. But upon further inspection, Huddleston realized that there were some pieces missing.

"I had to get pieces from Vegas, when that closed," he added. "Riker’s and Troi’s chairs were long gone. I got those ones, mint condition from the Vegas Experience."

But as any detail-obsessed TNG fan will recall (including yours truly), there weren’t three chairs in the center of the bridge, even though that’s how Star Trek: The Experience portrayed it. In fact, on the show, there were a total of five seats, with the two supplemental seats on the edge rarely used.

"I can tell you one thing—we are not just restoring the bridge as it was on display, as there are a couple pieces that were altered," he said. "There were chairs to the side of Riker’s and Troi’s chairs."

A bridge on tour

Huddleston added there are other details that he and his colleagues would like to make more precise.

"Worf’s panel [at the tactical station] was a bit shorter, and the [floor rise] was shorter [than on the actual show], and we’re extending it to make it more like the original bridge," he said.

But, he explained, the real coup de grâce will be making the wall-mounted computers touch-interactive, and ideally, to give those computers voice recognition. That way, fans could channel their inner Captain Picard.

"It will be an actual interactive bridge," Huddleston added. "The captain can put the bridge on red alert—then all the panels will blink."

Conceivably, the restored bridge with its viewscreen could also allow for fans to experience interactive simulations, ranging from the classic Kobayashi Maru scenario to Romulan or Borg attacks.

"Anything would be possible," he remarked. "It’s so beyond my comprehension. It would be the ultimate geek dream."

The Los Angeles-based fan said that it may take as long as 18 to 24 months for the bridge to be fully restored.

"[In the meantime], we’re going to have pieces of it going to different conventions, to show that we’re not full of it, [to show] that we’re actually doing this and when we’re completely done it will be on display, and we can take the entire thing to a convention."