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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."
D. The article makes reference to Ten Forward. Plus TNG was currently on the air at the time so it would have made the most sense.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
All of them except for the Pisa tower are far larger than the Enterprise would have been.
I had to google the exact measures but the Eiffel Tower (320 m) is way bigger than the other two monuments (I've seen the three of them with my eyes). It's a little taller than what the Enterprise is long (286 m). The Statue of Liberty (93 m) is much smaller and the statue alone (46 m) without the base would be shorter than the Pisa tower (58 m). Check this for the relative sizes (Pisa tower not included).
This is a point worth emphasising. The actual ships in Star Trek really are on an space age scale. The ship supposed to be over 1km long.
Rather than quote statistics, I'll just link to a Minecraft Megaproject video of a virtual 1:1 scale model of the ship (to 1m resolution). It's a lot bigger than the impression given by the Paramounts sets in the show. Seeing shuttle-bay 1 was an experience in itself, and illustrative of just how infeasible building such an object would really be.
May the Maths Be with you!
According to a page I found on the Internet, "D" is 642.5m long. But point taken, still big though. I don't know if that would have been profitable to build well.
The quote in the article:
"I don't want to be the guy that approved this and then it's a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever."
Nothing in Vegas stays forever. It's usually demolished to make way for the next thing, it doesn't matter if the building is steeped in history, if it's not profitable enough, it goes.