There's a building in China shaped like Star Trek's USS Enterprise
A Chinese tech company has modelled its headquarters on the USS Enterprise from the Star Trek sci-fi series
The resemblance is no accident Photo: YOUTUBE
By Soo Kim
1:22PM BST 21 May 2015
Trekkies bored of their annual conventions now have a new place of pilgrimage - the offices of a gaming firm in the obscure Chinese city of Fuzhou.
As these aerial shots show, the exterior of the NetDragon Websoft HQ in the south-eastern province of Fujian bears a striking resemblance to the shape of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise spaceship.
It's no accident. Mashable reports that Liu DeJian, the chairman of the tech firm, is an "uber Trekkie". He sought permission from the CBS broadcasting network in the US to create the $160m homage, which was built between 2008 and 2014 and is the only officially-licensed Star Trek replica building in the world.
The interior features other Star Trek-inspired elements, including automatic sliding gates between the different working areas. There are also 30-foot metal slides on the third floor that allow quick access to the ground level, and a replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur nicknamed Stan (after the palaeontologist who discovered parts of its skeleton in South Dakota in 1987).
The building on Google Earth
There have been previous attempts to build a USS Enterprise replica. In 1992, the Los Angeles-based entertainment venue design firm Goddard Group announced plans to launch a giant model of the Star Trek spaceship, but the project fell through.
The Starship Enterprise in the Star Trek film in 1979 (Alamy)
The $150 million replica would have loomed over downtown Las Vegas and become the “world’s largest attraction” and the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, Gary Goddard, the chairman and CEO of the group, claimed on the company’s website.
A rendering of the proposed Starship Enterprise replica in Las Vegas (Goddard Group)
The ship was to feature “all of the key rooms, chambers, decks and corridors that we knew from the movie” as well as a “a high-speed travelator that would whisk you from deck to deck”, he added.
Last year, it was reported that one Star Trek-obsessed fan built a replica ship worth £300,000 in his basement. Anthony Sforza, 48, has loved the show for as long as he can remember and started collecting action figures in the Eighties. He spent three years and more than 1,500 working hours recreating the interior of the iconic Enterprise ship in his Long Island home.
