A.J.

On a completely random note, footage of what looks like the Playland Coaster is in a Boost protein shake commercial.

I thought that Georgia Cyclone was supposed to be one of the better Cyclone interpretations (the others being the late Aska and Texas Cyclone).

Lightning Racer will run even if it's a rain shower. Source: personal experience.

Um, have you SEEN Rocky Mountain's coasters? Roller coaster design / engineering is function first. Always.

It really all depends on how much space all of the drive motor stuff takes. It looks like that unit that runs on the track would have motors for both the forward motion and the controlled flipping.

SOMEONE FINALLY ADMITS IT! I AM VINDICATED! In all seriousness, Herschend was looking for an edge, and Rocky Mountain gave it to them. This industry is no stranger to taking risks to gain an advantage in the market. No matter how much a manufacturer can sell reliability and no matter how much a park thinks that their next grand scheme will work, anything revolutionary is going to have teething problems. Lightning Rod's launch system and trains, Flight of Passage [apparently] not being able to operate at full capacity, issues with Volcano Bay's TapuTapu system... The list goes on.

I'll actually take you seriously here and say that it's not a whole lot different compared to Gravity Group's latest like Timber and Roar-O-Saurus.

Let's see here... Universal Orlando parks are creeping up the list. Islands of Adventure is now above Disney's California Adventure and Disneyland Paris, which took a pretty sizable drop. Both of the Songcheng parks on the top 25 last year are now gone, replaced by Shanghai Disneyland, and, surprisingly, the Paris Studios park. Shanghai Disneyland opened in June of last year, right? It could very well end up in the top ten for 2017. Also, Tivoli Gardens dropped a place! C'mon, Tivoli, I believe in you! Six Flags Great America (!) bumped Busch Gardens Williamsburg out of the top 20 in North America. The OCT Group and Fantawild are dominating the bottom half of the Asia list. Wanda who? Only a tiny bit of shuffling in Europe / Middle East / Africa.

The problem is that they've likely spent a lot of time and resources training their team members to operate with the system exclusively. Further "tweaking" the system may make more business sense than turning it off and having to retrain everyone, add wait time meters to entrances, and change their marketing strategy. I won't speculate on which approach they should / are going to take, as it's not my place. But, for better or worse, this is the sort of thing that happens when a park makes an attempt to innovate. It's a gamble. IF that's the case, it's an unfortunate cascade / domino effect. Lines get long, more people buy express passes to skip them, which means lines get longer, then express pass returns take longer because there are more people... Do they set a limit on how many express passes they'll sell in a day?

I mean...kind of? The only park that you should even consider doing in a half-day is Dorney Park. Hersheypark is a full-day experience by any standard, and Knoebels is only a half-day if you just want to get in, ride the coasters, and leave. I recommend against the "whirlwind tour" thing unless you're actually local to the area.

Having to wait an extra half hour after you've been told that you're "ready to ride" on your wristband is...unreal. I'd deal with ten minutes or even fifteen on a busy day, especially if it's for an attraction where the queue is used for story set-up, but not a half hour. That would make me very upset as an uninformed guest, as my "virtual queue" turned out to basically just be a "queue queue". Waiting in line to wait in line. Is the children's area on the virtual queue system? Please say no. The park environment looks pretty good though. The attraction entrance signage is probably my favorite part, followed by all the different funny "costumes" for the tikis.

Because they likely actually costed the same as Millennium Force. Maybe the track was more expensive? Maybe the trains? Maybe the supports? You can't just assume that every 250-foot tall coaster should cost less than a 300-foot one just because of the height / length difference. There are too many variables that you don't know about.

Hey, Windjammer, how's it going?

It does look like the Raptor track has a much lower heartline than your typical roller coaster, but you will never get a true inline twist unless someone re-hires those misunderstood geniuses that came up with the Ultra Twister, Pipeline Coaster, and / or Spiral Coaster. Because the track is so narrow, though, a normal heartline roll will still end up looking like a stretched out corkscrew.

How about we don't settle this? Xcelerator is a pretty big coaster designed well enough to fit on a fairly small plot of land. The end. The only people that really should be caring about this are the people that work at / for Knott's and the city of Buena Park.

While the Next Generation era is probably the most recognizable Star Trek right now, I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't set the story a little bit later in the timeline so they could have the characters from Deep Space Nine and / or Voyager too. Even as easter eggs.

On the contrary, it often costs more to build in a smaller space with lots of existing development around it. How much more time do you think it would take to finagle coaster pieces through a crowded park like a game of Tetris compared to just building something in an open field? More time and effort also has to be taken when building the foundations for the thing to ensure that existing stuff isn't disturbed or negatively impacted by the new construction. With Knott's it's not too bad because the area around The Boardwalk is pretty open, but imagine what it's like for Gröna Lund or Tivoli Gardens.

And you know this...how, exactly?

The cast members in the area have their own Pandora name tags as well. It makes the "Mr. Consistency" part of me squirm but I think it certainly helps with the immersion that they were looking for.

Pre- and post-season, they do the pay-one-price because weekends are the only days that they're open. All other weeks, pay-one-price is weekdays only. The S-B-Star as marked on the calendar: Star - means that pay-one-price and after-4PM wristbands are available for the rides and rides plus coasters B - means that it's a bargain night (Wed and Fri), where you can get a heavily discounted wristband for the rides but not the coasters after 6PM S - means that they're offering discounts for school groups of 50 or more It's not confusing, it's that on certain days, they have some extra options. I consider that a positive.

While I'm disappointed that a playground was taken away for Whistle Punk Chaser, as a coaster and experience, it looks much nicer and more fun than Sideshow Spin did.

Wow, this is the dumbest post I've seen in a long time. While the delivery left a little to be desired, that IS how it works. When you see the numbers 800 / hour, 1000 / hr, 1200 / hr, etc posted publicly, that's the -theoretical- hourly ride capacity. That capacity is only reached when you have perfect dispatches, no stacking, no guests holding up the loading and unloading, no rechecking of harnesses / restraints, every train on the circuit, no downtime - all at once. The only instance where a coaster will actually reach the theoretical number is if every train is boarded and ready to go before it's allowed to actually leave the station, or if there's only one train at all (like on Premier Sky Rocket IIs). The only places where I have seen this happen consistently are the Disney parks, and Knoebels. In nearly every other park I go to, there is at least some form of stacking going on, especially with major coasters. In my work I generally like to estimate that under most circumstances, the actual capacity will be somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters the theoretical depending on the day.

Basically, the trains have a pretty small window of speed / time stamps that they're allowed to be within for Flying Turns to run. If the coaster is going too fast or too slow they pull the fast / slow train or shut the entire thing down until conditions improve.

I prefer Wegmans over Weis, but it's not bad.

Because, people leave their brains at home when they go on vacation, and that includes the parts that keep them responsible for their own safety. Also, your definition of "the restraint being down far enough" may not match the standard set by the manufacturer or the park. They set the rules - how "safe" or "unsafe" you want to feel during a ride is NOT your decision to make. If you don't like it, you shouldn't be there.