By Mark O’Neill

It always amazes me how much time some people have on their hands! A very dedicated Star Trek fan has built a 3D model of the Starship Enterprise for Google Earth.

The downside though (and there is ALWAYS a downside in something this cool) is that it takes forever for the model to load in Google Earth. The model has 42 decks and by default the model tries to load every deck, which is very time consuming. So I found that it goes faster if you disable the loading of all decks above deck 20. When everything up to deck 20 is loaded, then begin loading the rest 5 decks at a time. But if you try to load all 42 decks at once, the loading slows to a complete crawl.

The model loads in the middle of the Pacific Ocean probably because, as the Google Earth blog points out, if it loaded over land, the Google Earth program would slow down even more. Plus once it is all finally fully loaded, you can’t really do much with the model except admire it and move it around the screen like a true Trekkie, making Picard noises and growling like a Klingon.

Click on the picture of the Enterprise to see a bigger version of the model. It’s amazing the amount of detail that went into this.

Does anyone else know of anything similar for Google Earth? Maybe someone has done the entire Klingon battle-fleet?!

Or anything Star Wars related?