USS Enterprise (Gideon)

A replica of the USS Enterprise was an installation built by the Gideonites on their homeworld, the planet. The building was designed to fool Starfleet Captain James T. Kirk into thinking he was aboard his own vessel, the Federation starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). The replica contained some working systems, as well as readouts tailored to fit Kirk's expectations of what his ship's controls and computer banks would tell him when he attempted to operate the imaginary vessel through space.

The illusion had some faults, as the teeming population of the world crowded around the ship and could be heard through the walls, and some of the viewscreen technology experienced failure, briefly showing actual images of the massive crowds through the transparent observation deck and bridge viewports.


 * The observation deck seen was not the same area that appeared in, which was in the rear of the ship above the shuttlebay. The replica's viewport was only seen aboard this fake Enterprise, and had a curved wall indicating it was on the upper saucer dome structure, or the upper half of the secondary hull.

As the Gideons worked toward their goal of extracting Vegan choriomeningitis from Kirk, he found himself confronted by Gideonite guards and successfully defeated them in hand-to-hand combat. Spock, suspecting that Kirk was in danger, also beamed to the Enterprise replica, and helped Kirk finally confront Ambassador Hodin about his plan to use the dormant disease in Kirk's body to infect Odana and many other Gideonites, to end the problem of their overpopulation. Kirk left the dying Odana in the duplicate of his room on the fake Enterprise, and departed with Spock, thwarting Hodin's plan of killing Kirk to hide the shame of victimizing him. 


 * In a society so lacking in space and supplies, it seems like a frivolous expense to create such a detailed copy of the Enterprise, and it seems unlikely the Gideons would have such exact information about Federation technology and the procedure for operating the computer and controls of a starship.