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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
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.
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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
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!
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.
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
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.
Supposedly the Constitution class could do saucer-sep maneuvers nearly as easily as the Galaxy class.
Don't know if that's canon or not, but I definitely read it in a novel or two back in the day.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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!
I guess it was just
*shades*
Too much of a gamble
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.
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."
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.