Designer Times
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54. Las Vegas - Treasure Island Pirate Battle Show - Secrets Revealed

The original 1993 Pirate Battle Show at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas was typical Steve Wynn Las Vegas Unique. The Hotel facing Las Vegas Boulevard was in the form of a highly detailed Pirate Village complete with a large lagoon. Anchored at one end of this lagoon was the Hispaniola, a large Pirate Ship. A British Warship, Britannia, lay 200 feet north just off Skull Rock. Both ships were square rigged frigates typical of the late 1700s.

Ships? Nope.....the Hispaniola was a stationary steel framed building on a concrete foundation and built under the Clark County Building Code as a "sign". Britannia was a 65 ton four-wheeled wagon running on a flat concrete submerged roadway and guided by two large pipe track rails. This underwater roadway, along with numerous special EFX were hidden by wave action and dark blue paint. What's amazing is that there's a ton of equipment located all over the lagoon that is near invisible to passersby because of the masking effect of the blue paint and the wave machines. But if you ever saw the lagoon when drained, you could see how the show works.

Britannia looks like a ship from the side, but if you looked straight down on her, she's an open steel framework with a slotted grid work deck.

Underneath this deck is a space filled with all kinds of lighting, fire and explosion EFX equipment. Moveable cannons line the port side. The hull section is completely open on the bottom. Water flows freely through the framework during the sinking and un-sinking actions.

The Britannia has a large diameter pipe keel with a triangular structure to support the deck area and hold the side ribs. These ribs are covered with wood-patterned fiberglass panels. Steel pipe mast assemblies rise from the keel up thru the deck and are secured by guy cables to the hull deck side structures. All of the sailing ship details are non-structural set decorations. The whole deal is just a big old hunk of rolling show setwork made to look like a real floating ship.

When the construction of the Britannia began (originally christened Sir Frances Drake) I started the internal structural design while awaiting the ship exterior shape design from the architects. Charlie White of Olio Design had made beautiful side view renderings of both ships. Since I needed a hull design of any frigate for quick reference, I bought a plastic model kit of the Jolly Roger. I transferred the plastic kit shapes into my Macintosh for temporary use. But no approved architect ship drawings were ever produced.

So I plowed ahead with the Jolly Roger hull shape and no one said a word. I designed the side rib curves and the fiberglass shop simply covered them from stem to stern and that was that.

Part way into the construction of the Britannia, I was asked to make fabrication drawings of the Hispaniola, but don't stop work on the Britannia. Well, since any frigate will do, I just edited the Jolly Roger layouts in my Mac to fit the upper railing lines Charlie drew for the Hispaniola. Since the Hispaniola was a fixed steel building, it was easy to convert the internal framework to fit a concrete foundation. So we literally got the Hispaniola for very little extra work.

All Las Vegas special show stuff has to go thru Clark County Building and Safety code approval. This requires what are called "wet signed" structural engineering plans. Kent Bingham of Entertainment Engineering in Burbank did all of the Pirate Battle Show approval engineering. These two "ships" were to be engineered to withstand 80 mph winds when in full sail. The Britannia had to withstand these winds when tipped over sinking at a 30 degree angle.

I had to design upstop structures to keep the ship from rolling over. These required that the guide rail be real big and be connected solidly into the underwater concrete roadway.

And all of the wind loads had to be resisted by the entire sail, yardarm, and mast structures also. There was a massive amount of engineering effort and construction detail that had to be accomplished while staying on schedule and within budget. Add to all this the really incredible precautions required to build super safe giant fire and explosion EFX intermingled with a large live human stunt cast. The whole show remember, is to realistically depict a fatal battle between the British Navy and the renegade Pirates where the Britannia goes down, taking it's captain with her....but nobody gets hurt.

The moving Britannia carried a massive amount of lighting and electronically controlled devices which had to be connected to shore by a humongous extension cord....a big bundle of fat cables that had to stay hooked up to the ship as it traveled 180 feet during each show. And the ship also had to be propelled on a path that had two different radius arcs. A steering system of guide wheels steers the (4) 36 inch diameter main wheels along the ship's path. A really weird design allows the electrical cabling to slither along a trick pathway to accommodate the ship's travel.

But the clever trick was to move the ship to the sinking position, then allow the ship to automatically disengage from the propulsion system so as to roll over 30 degrees and sink into a 36 foot deep pit. Pete Mensching of Showtech, the show builders, came up with an underwater wire rope cable propulsion system idea. A cableway sort of like a ski lift would be located underwater and propel a wheeled cart on a special track. This cart (we called it the dog) had an engagement feature that would move the ship but let it roll and sink away from the dog, then pull the ship back to the start position after the ship "unsank" and re-engaged the dog.

The cable was driven by a winch drum in an underwater propulsion room. This meant the cable would have to pass thru a wall continuously under water pressure into a dry room. So Pete came up with this nutty but practical slow leak seal device which was arranged such that the leaking water fell into a "fish tank" which had to be pumped out 24 hours a day with no failures allowed. The winch had a spiral wind, meaning each cable wrap lay next to the preceding wrap. Normally it's no problem to allow sideways travel on a cable lay, but the cable seal hole could not move. So the winch moved sideways. Sheer madness but clever, and it worked perfect, thanks to Pete's fearless creativity.