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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!!!
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
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. :-)
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Galactica was pseudo religious military wank with a dash of body horror and a vague stab at challenging social issues like racism to be honest, an homage to the Bush era.
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.
CVN-65.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
The images loaded for me -- it was the Enterprise A. And it looked great in the pics, it has to be said.
Can't really see the issue they had. Everything in Vegas gets blown up after a decade or so. It would have paid for itself in that time -- especially if it looked as good as it does in the pics, and did inside too.
If they installed working phasers they could have taken a lot of work out of demolishing casinos!
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.
Enterprise NCC 1701-A and NCC-1701 are different ships. But they are the same design and look exactly the same on the outside. But have very different bridges. The 1701-A is filled with the backlight touch panels. NCC 1701 was destroyed in STIII. I vote for Enterprise 1701-A, since I thought it had the coolest looking interiors and exteriors, and was featured in Star Trek VI ( as well as ST-V, but that should not reflect badly on the ship, it was a fine vessel). If the Las Vegas 1701-A is staffed with a crew, have them wear the Star Trek II-VI uniform style which I liked better than any other style used on the entire series. It was very distinctive but not too cheesy.
Nothing sits for long after it stops being popular/profitable, they implode it and build something else.
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.
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!
1701-D would have been huge, perhaps too large to be feasible, the !701-A was 289 M long, 72 M high and 127 meters wide which would make it a lot more feasible
TFS says "refit Enterprise". So that'd be the one from TMP (1979). No bloody A, B, C or D. As Scotty once said (TNG: "Relics". God I'm a nerd).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
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! ~~
1701-D would have been huge, perhaps too large to be feasible, the !701-A was 289 M long, 72 M high and 127 meters wide which would make it a lot more feasible
" Feasible" isn't a word that comes immediately to mind as a limiting convept while walking around in Vegas.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's as true as saying that Star Trek is just a long story about people in pajamas.
The powers that be in Vegas refused to license Fizzbin tables.
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!
This would have been in LasVegas. All females would have worn the mini-skirts from TOS.
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
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.
You don't know many physicists, do you?
Sadly, this one is schedule for decommissioning. The "Big E" may live on as another ship, but this one is going to be turned into scrap metal and sold to China (most likely).
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.
Quite the opposite. It would have been a hit.
Star Trek has become somewhat of an American icon show. Go out there and find a single person who doesn't know about Star Trek (don't ask the Amish, that's unfair, stay with the, as you called them, normals). Every single person knows about Star Trek. And even if the movie wasn't a hit, people would flock there to see "an Enterprise". They don't give a fuck what movie it was from, but they'd want to see it.
The die hard fans would certainly complain about how inaccurate it is and how the tech print demands something completely different in this or that area, but (and that's what counts for its makers), they would still go there, if for no other reason than to verify with their own eyes that it is inaccurate.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
ST dealt with large moral issues.
Galactica about individual personal issue.
Nothing there to compare.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's moving as quickly as possible away from family friendly. Turned out catering to peopel on a tight budget, with special needs for kids, and don't drink as much doesn't make as much money as young people with excess cash and a desire to break the house.
A family around a pool in a casino is nothing but lost revenue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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."
Enterprise 1701 LV XXX
Beam aboard for Baccarat at the captains helm.
Replicator buffet 24/7.
Non stop Holo-brothel.
Shooting craps with the boys in engineering.
Vulcan security guards.
Romulan Cocktails......
We are talking about Vegas
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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.
Las Vegas made me realize that New York City is tastefully understated.