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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!!!
CVN-65.
Have gnu, will travel.
They're building a cloaked ship, whaddya expect?
Table-ized A.I.
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!
Where, I am sure, some eccentric billionaire would buy it. I mean, it would be the ONLY life sized complete Enterprise in existence.
That's the first good reason I've heard for wanting to be filthy rich!
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....
I guess it was just
*shades*
Too much of a gamble
Why not? We did it for the Washington Monument which is nothing but a giant rock dildo.
But it so perfectly symbolizes what the People have come to expect from D.C.
Quite the contrary, as you know, physicists are big into experimentation. Vegas would love to have the physicists, except... Well, you know how people sometimes get a little crazy on the Las Vegas booze, hookers and drugs scene, and cause a ruckus; there was one year the Physical Society's meeting happened to overlap with the pharmacist's and psychiatrist's conventions...going on, oh about 50 years ago now.
Now, some people are bound to call me a liar, or say I have a runaway imagination, but buried in a vault somewhere under Washington, there's a classified briefing my grand-pappy told me about--he was a fed you see--and if you go down to the FBI office and ask someone, they're going to deny it and look at you like you're some kind of lunatic. And if you press 'em on it, they're going to call the cops and people with white coats. That's when you know you've got 'em in a lie, it's right in the secret FBI training manual under Chapter 11, Deny, Divert and Attack! You know, so you'd better not. Ask anyone that is.
Anyway, to make a short story long, many of the physicists, pharmacists, and psychiatrists shared the same hotel, and as is always the case in a large enough group of people, some of the pharmacists were into the...recreational side of their business, and the psychiatrists, well, you know how they always want to know what makes people tick.
As a prank, and to get the physicists to loosen up, the pharmacists slipped a bunch of amphetamines and the psychiatry researchers' LSD into the physicists' punch bowl. Nobody knows how they did it, but the hopped-up and wigged-out physicists spent the next five days straight in the conference room where they built at life size, fully functional replica of Big Boy, right there in Sands Hotel.
Now, this was also about the time the Roswell aliens escaped Area 51, the aliens kidnapped the atom bomb and held Las Vegas as ransom for their flying saucer and took Humphrey Bogart hostage...but I digress. That's a whole 'nother story, and if I told you I'd have to kill you. So, in a nutshell, that's why LSD research was banned, because when you mix physicists with amphetamines, LSD, and spiked punch, doomsday almost happens, and aliens fly off with Humphrey fucking Bogart. We just can't take the chance.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Las Vegas made me realize that New York City is tastefully understated.