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How Las Vegas Missed Out on a Life-Sized Starship Enterprise
T-Kir writes "Apparently 20 years ago, instead of the Fremont Experience, downtown Las Vegas was actually close to building a life sized version of the refit USS Enterprise, and would have — had it not been for the then studio chairman Stanley Jaffe nixing it at the final meeting. The project had support from Paramount licensing and then-CEO Sherry Lansing, the Las Vegas Mayor, and the downtown redevelopment committee, but not opinion of Mr Jaffe: 'I don't want to be the guy that approved this and then it's a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.' As a Trek fan, I'm saddened that this never got built because I feel that this would've appealed to a much wider audience than science fiction fans. Props to io9 for picking this story up."
KAHN!!!
Enterprise A? Or Enterprise D?
The images from the site aren't showing up. :(
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
While it sounds awesome, the guy who cancelled it is right on the money - it would have just sat there for some time languisingh after the novelty wore off for people.
Vegas already had the coolest Star Trek exhibit/show I've ever seen (Qwark's bar and two really well done shows). That is gone now. If those great shows could not survive, no way the Enterprise would have lasted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm saddened as well, but we trekkies may love this but it would probably still have flopped. The submitter says it would have appealed to a much broader audience but I don't think so. When you're a fan of something you always think that everyone will find it the coolest thing on earth, but experience has taught me that when people come upon things outside their bubble of interest, they'll just go "meh". It would have met the same fate as "Star Trek: The Experience". But it still makes me sad that it wasn't built. Oh well, one day we'll build real spaceships and even though they might look nothing like the Enterprise, they'll be much closer in spirit.
If they're too cowardly to give the go-ahead to a licensing project where they're not even fronting the cash, but just collecting royalties, to hell with them. I'd rather have the Galactica, anyway.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Next we'll have an informer tell us that Mr. Jaffe has been busy secretly buying up property in Iowa.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
But if there was a "Life-Sized" enterprise in which I could book passage (rent a room) and visit 10-Forward or see the bridge, I would make the "trek" to vegas. I am sure I am not the only tight ass that would do this... Flop? I don;t thin it would be, espesially if they built the Emporer's imperial cruiser next door and they had weekly geek fights to see which would win. :-)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
sure it would look like the Star Trek Enterprise on the outside but once you get inside it then it will be like any other Las Vegas casino = full of slot machines, roulette wheels, blackjack tables etc...etc...etc... which would ruin the whole thing
http://i.imgur.com/kezWj.jpg
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
OP said he was saddened it wasn't built, but the real question is would he have actually gone to Vegas and left money there in the casino?
That's all that matters to casinos, Enterprise ships or not.
from an engineering stand point alone. In the photos the entire saucer section is only held up by the neck piece down to the engineering section. Building this thing would be a feat all on its own.
I would argue that each of those are more timeless and universal than the Enterprise would have been.
All of them except for the Pisa tower are far larger than the Enterprise would have been.
You know that the Enterprise would not have been built nearly as well as any of those things.
Also ALL of the things you list are nationally beloved monuments to the respective countries they are in, meaning there is money from a whole nation to take care of each of those national treasures. Can you honestly say with a straight face that a crumbling Enterprise in Vegas would draw the nation in to repair it as was done with the Statue of Liberty?
I mean, if you're going to go there then the parallel is that it would have been repaired by now, but you wouldn't be able to go to the bridge anymore. Well what the hell good is THAT???
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From wiki:
Length 642.5 Meters
Width 467.0 Meters
Height 137.5 Meters
This is not trivial. There are no structural integrity fields in the real world. 150M$ for that? Doubtful.
Mostly random stuff.
Nothing sits for long after it stops being popular/profitable, they implode it and build something else.
"Fapping Slashdot dorks hardest hit"
They should have opened investment to fans. Fans are more likely to invest in a risk (boondoggle) because they are thinking with their hearts instead of just their minds.
Table-ized A.I.
I think 1701-A of 1701-B would look best with a crew staffed in ST II-VI uniforms. There could be a hotel inside, as well as restaurants, all themed like the real ship.
I was never fond of 1701-D or nor the crews unform from that era, though, the STNG series was well written and well executed. I always wished they could couple the story line quality of STNG with the styles of the 1701-A or 1701-B era. I found the tight fitting uniforms of D to be cheesy and the ship too cheesy as well.
Another factor is the 1701-A was a much smaller ship than the D, the D is just a huge thing that might be completely infeasible to build, if they want to build the thing to spec, it would be enormous.
I imagine this thing could have rather than a mock up, could have been an entire building, including a built in hotel and so on. But the saucer section raises quistions on structural support, I am not sure if it would be possible to construct an unsupported, hanging saucer section without some sort of supports from below, in a feasible way. Having support columns from below for the saucer section would take away from the whole thing. Probably the main hull could be fully occupied hotel and attraction space and they might have to settle with a shell for saucer, with some places inside being built, such as the bridge and so on, unless a way can be found to build the saucer.
A better choice would be to build a giant penguin. Then us Linux guys could worship at its feet! Idolatry is so cool!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Then you can pack more gamblers inside, than it appears outside. The dream of every casino owner.
And if the house starts to lose big time . . . just skip back in time, to before the bets were placed.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There's a rumor that the American Physical Society is banned from hosting their conferences in Vegas because physicists don't gamble, don't have champagne parties with hookers, and drink considerably less then the average Vegas-goer. I'd assume that these points also applied to anyone getting excited about a Star Trek themed hotel.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Holodeck Whorehouse.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm not super-trekkie, but I know from personal experience that the Hilton in Vegas through away massive amounts of convention/conference business when it closed down Quark's. =\
I miss my Moogie's Choice Pasta and Warp Core Breach
Seriously this would have gotten me to make regular visits to Vegas just to see the whole damn thing. Also if they bundled this with actual science type things it would have been fantastic. Hell I bet even Neal deGrasse Tyson would have done one of his talks/shows/etc from the bridge if they worked things out right. It'd have been a boon for education, science, and future dreamers. The money draw in would have been huge.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
As a Trek fan, I'm saddened that this never got built because I feel that this would've appealed to a much wider audience than science fiction fans.
Are you new here? Stop whining about what somebody else shoulda oughtta done and put your efforts where your conviction is: throw a proposal up on Kickstarter or similar and then wait for the millions of dollars to roll in from all these alleged Trekkies-in-the-closet. If you're not just nuts, then you get to build the Enterprise, and if you are just nuts, then you'll have it confirmed in a way you can't ignore....
Well someone did create a to scale verson in minecraft but it does give you a persective on how big it would have been http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94 also here is an update to it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epYmWk9Q3g4
The powers that be in Vegas refused to license Fizzbin tables.
...and, on the positive side, -more- venture capital actually found its way to fund the development of the start-up's "secret sauce" and/or the marketing of the resulting product.
Is that so bad? :-/
PS Fewer people coming to 'Vegas (eg, to see a lone Star Trek monument, that might seem out-of-place, in the context) isn't necessarily a bad thing. Better to have it along side some other innovative technologies, so that visitors (to some aerospace-city) can get a look at the -range- of ideas & implementations, including those that may be built in future.
They should still do this; but someplace else. I'm thinking they should do a crashed and burnt version somewhere out-of-the-way. OK, not too far out of the way. Someplace that would welcome the traffic. Maybe somewhere along I-15 on the way to Vegas from LA. There's plenty of dester there. Of course you'd be better off doing it in Nevada because the environmental impact in California would take forever. Anyway, far enough away from the city. Crashed starship, but still oriennted so you can go in side and have a looksie. If you crash it so that saucer section is flat and the nacelles are all burned up and scattered, that's the way to go. If not I-15, the Roswell corridor but it gets much less traffic. Only a few Slashdotters would make that trek. You need bunches of people on the way to someplace like Vegas to make it economicly viable.
Captain Kirk's doppleganger can just name his price and have that internet site he endorses foot the bill for the construction of this iconic piece of science fiction history! :D
Joking of course, ^^; but realistically I don't see how it could be built without the saucer section or the engines drooping or snapping off due to the weight imbalance. :( Adding external support struts to hold them up in place would destroy the versimilitude of the whole thing.
I wonder if there is a big enough market for a geek hotel in Vegas. Maybe shaped like the enterprise but with as many geek oriented things as possible. Lan parties, demo scene parties, techno music? (maybe that's my bias), arcades, VR stuff, video games, board games, card games, figure games, game competitions, hack-a-thons, maker studios, hi-tech rooms, gadget stores,
I suppose one problem would be keeping it ahead of the tech curve but maybe they could get various corporate sponsors or have the guest themselves help upgrade stuff. (the open source resort so to speak)
I guess it was just
*shades*
Too much of a gamble
Awww, That would have been the one thing that I would actually want to see in Vegas. Celine Dion does not interest me all that much.
Too Bad.
Justin
Winemaking-Equipment.com
It's a good thing they never built this full-sized Enterprise replica. By now it would be looking pretty shabby. It would have been become cheesy and embarrassing. At its best, Star Trek was kitsch (in a good sense). Kitsch on a scale like this, in Las Vegas, would have pretty much spoiled a great experience.
Big things in Las Vegas tend to end up looking small and sad. I'm a fan of the place, honestly, but whenever it tries to assimilate pop culture of a vintage later than the Rat Pack, it always ends up diminishing it (except for Wayne Newton and the Super Bowl, who Las Vegas managed to make a little bit heroic). Does the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower gain stature by being part of Vegas or lose it?
Further, Las Vegas has become itself diminished by becoming more "family friendly". It now feels like some hip night club after last call when the house lights come up. Everything that was cool and filled with sex and promise is now wan and grimy. Vegas was once a wonderland of possibilities (almost entirely unfulfilled but still fun) and is now a slightly nauseous mix.
Best that it leaves our memories alone. The Enterprise in Las Vegas would have been the Star Wars Christmas Special without the charm, ugly and shabby and small.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The normals wouldn't get it and the trekkies would complain about all the inauthenticity, saying things like: "The REAL Enterprise didn't have (disgusted face) BATHROOMS!" Then they would try see how much synthohol they could drink in the ten forward bar.
So by fear of looking bad if the idea turn out to be a flop this Jaffe dude will always be known as the douchebag who killed the life size USS Enterprise project!
And he wasn't fired on the spot? This is Star Trek. It CANNOT flop. Hell, even if it DOES flop the life-size model would be a Tourist magnet.
Ponder this for a moment. Think of the worst Star Trek movie you have seen. Preferably if you are not that big into Star Trek, I mean, you watch it (you're a geek, right?), you know about it, you enjoy it from time to time, but you won't have your wedding according to Klingon rites.
Would you still go to see the ship from said movie if you were even remotely close to it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For your run-of-the-mill box of air, you're right. The city fathers and landowners have no problem with doing whatever it takes to keep the main industry area fresh and profitable. The hangup with Enterprise (serial number whatever) would have been that the engineering to cantilever the structure without unsightly pillars would have made it a bear to tear down.
Assuming it was run as a hotel/casino, another hassle would have been the lack of windows for most rooms. Even today, there aren't video displays high-rez/natural 3D enough to replace a GD pane of glass. Yes, the Trek franchise has had legs, but as a full-size ship on the Strip (or anywhere other than orbit), a niche cultural icon like Enterprise would quickly get old.
Luke, help me take this mask off
if sci-fi ever reach china, there will be 2 full star ship Enterprise vessel.
they did build optimuse prime.
Screw enterprise. Lets see vegas build a working stargate. That would impress me more.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Wow, you guys are nerds. I thought we were talking about an aircraft carrier.
Archaeologists would find this ancient starship and think that our civilization got in space-travel first!
Not to mention that all these weapons and lasers would freak them out since it would suggest that we had battles with alien civilizations.
If it was a hotel, combined with a Star Trek simulator, i.e. if you could pay for an hour of playing the captain or an officer in it, it could have worked.
I live in the other side of the planet, but if this was real, I'd save up to visit America just for this.
In Bavaria, Ludwig II von Sachsenhausen caused a load of pre-Hollywood fantasy castles to be built; for many people they are the defining image of Bavaria. Personally I barely know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, but I suspect that a huge building in the shape of an enormous fantasy spaceship would, in exactly the same way, define its own myth. If it wasn't built too well, before long there would be a campaign to rebuild or restore it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The builders of Pisa didn't do a bad job. They lived in a pre-geology era. The Baptistery on the same site is fine. Builders continue to build on unsuitable sites, but without the same excuse. Winchester Cathedral was built on marshy ground on a foundation of, wait for it, elm logs. Who in their right senses builds a stone building on a platform of logs? Answer: prescientific people who believed that God took a personal interest in their work. Now we live in an age when we have materials science and huge accumulated knowledge, we can overcome the problems and keep those buildings up. To put it another way, building a concrete Enterprise wouldn't be a challenge for modern civil engineering, and it wouldn't need state of the art building methods. In relative terms, the builders could do a much worse job than the people who put up Pisa and still come up with a satisfactory result.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Leave it to the intellectuals crowding the city limits of Hollywood to make complex, intricate decisions that would screw up a one man clod fight. Must be something in the coke on the left coast.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
From TFA:
There was to be the dining area for the shipâ(TM)s crew (where you could dine in Star Fleet comfort), and other special features.
And the one in the mockups is NCC-1701-A. Blue navigation deflector. Nacelles no longer round.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701-A)
Also, back in 1992, latest Star Trek movie was The Undiscovered Country - featuring NCC-1701-A, which get decommissioned at the end.
Which again, would have fit in nicely with it being "exhibited" in Las Vegas.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If they decide to do it in the near future, I hope they don't build that stupid looking one from the last movie that came out. That was NOT Star Trek, it was some Campy basterdized ripoff.
No, It is to be either the Constitution Class (1701) or the Enterprise Class (1701A)
I've been to Vegas four times and maybe gambled $50 among all visits.
Everyone should go to Vegas at least once just to take in the spectacle. The large casino/hotel complexes are kind of awe-inspiring in the way that Disneyworld is. The shopping mall attached to Caesar's Palace has a spiral escalator in its 3 story marble atrium. And that's just a minor example.
There are a ton of great restaurants, the hotel rooms are usually a cut above, and the pools are pretty cool, too.
And even if you don't want that aspect of Las Vegas, you can always go a short distance and see the Hoover Dam and the almost-as-amazing 93 bridge they just completed south of the Hoover Dam (you can walk over it, and its pretty spectacular in and of itself).
I like Las Vegas as a weekend-getaway kind of a place. Take in a show, hang out at the pool, eat a couple of good meals and maybe throw away $10 in the slot machines for the free drinks.
Frankly, they should have built the ship. It would have fit in perfectly.
Yell at Scotty all you want to, but a full-size enterprise doesn't shield you from the punishing Vegas sun. The Fremont Experience does. It's actually a quite tasteful (for Vegas) attraction, and it's fun to watch at night while you go casino-hopping. I'd definitely recommend going to see it if you're ever in Vegas.
I have a different theory, that I call the Age of Classics.
Those same items wouldn't be nearly as legendary/famous as they are if they were built today. Sure, they'd be neat, but not the symbolic representations of culture. It's because they were created in former ages, when civilization as a whole was less advanced, so that one truly memorable monument stood out. The same thing has happened on the literature side - the 20's century produced the greatest span of books the world has ever seen, yet a lot of classes spend lots of time on the same 25 "classics".
While I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, I had a slow inkling that education in the traditional school curriculum is actually producing a very narrow education. Somewhere past grade school once you get beyond dinosaurs and space shuttles, the topics all lock down into "classics", especially in the literature side.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My dad had a business that took him to all kinds of meetings, and I often tagged along. His role in "parenting" was generally to give me some cash and warn me to stay out of trouble. In my teen years I was a serious shutterbug and more than a bit of a punk, so I would find ways to entertain myself and downtown Vegas in the 70s was a very entertaining place, and I definitely don't mean "entertaining" in the way that Vegas intends to be. I have so many photos of weird people in weird places doing weird things, that I am forever grateful for the experience that was Vegas. Some of my favorite images are from Fremont Street when it was the dreadful place of last resort for so many different castoffs from society, when the street was absolutely filthy, when even in the city of gamblers, nobody would have covered a bet that Fremont Street would become what it is today -- a primary destination for tourists who are looking for something other than the ugly.
I would say Firefly would be the most depressing universe, but the "engine rooms" would make it all worthwhile!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The other guy was probably talking abut the REPLICAS of those things.
The inclusion of the Tower Of Pisa drove that from my mind.
But even if that is what he meant, the smaller Statue of Liberty is just a small part of Mew York New York, and the Eiffel Tower is a pretty simply structure when you think about it, easy to maintain. Also it has only a restaurant inside which can look like anything, whereas an Enterprise would have to be themed which increases costs and makes maintenance harder (many custom parts).
I have been to Vegas many times, that's why I responded as I did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"I don't want to be the guy that approved this and then it's a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.'"
Yeah, tell that to the guy who created the Moon. It's HUGE, was a flop according to the Apollo missions, and pretty much useless (until we figure out something to do with it). Though it's a.) plays a huge role in the Earth's ecosystem/solar system and b.) is actually, freakin awesome.
To the Vegas mayor: small minds should stick with small problems. NEXT.
[quote]"You know, this is a major project. You're going to put a full-scale ENTERPRISE up in the heart of Las Vegas. And on one hand that sounds exciting. But on another hand, it might not be a great idea for us – for Paramount." Everyone in the room was stunned, most of all, me, because I could see where this was going. "In the movie business, when we produce a big movie and it's a flop – we take some bad press for a few weeks or a few months, but then it goes away. The next movie comes out and everyone forgets. But THIS – this is different. If this doesn't work – if this is not a success – it's there, forever." I remember thinking to myself "oh my god, this guy does NOT get it." And he said "I don't want to be the guy that approved this and then it's a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever."[/quote] Well, now we know why Star Trek started sucking real hard after DS9. No balls in the upper management. That's why they tried reheating the old material and ended up releasing drek like Voyager and Enterprise instead of trying something new and fresh.
I read the internet for the articles.