A.J.

^ Took me a few seconds to realize that you were referring to Son of Beast there.

I haven't been to a park since I went to Fun Spot in November last year. But thanks to the coastal hurricane, I'm flying home and going to Knoebels this weekend! I'm dying inside.

You make it should like Vekoma has done a lot of inherently bad work. Rough, I'll give you, but that's not always their fault.

Yeah, they have a Sky Tower, which is really meant for families. Zamperla does make larger towers though.

Those who have been in recently - any other interesting 45th merchandise apart from the Magic Bands and some T-shirts?

Vekoma, because all hail the Dutch.

This is true, but there are definitely limitations when using an existing structure, as opposed to knocking the thing down and starting from scratch. Now, granted, Mean Streak is ridiculously drawn-out so that might not be as much of an issue. But, at least in my opinion, to say that "New Mean Streak" will be dramatically different from New Texas Giant is a little...optimistic, based on what's already there. I for one would love a New Texas Giant that's how ever many hours closer to my house.

Opinions provided by logical beings like ourselves are unwelcome here. In all seriousness, they added 10 feet to Texas Giant, I would expect the same or similar in this case. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if whatever Mean Streak ends up being is very similar to what became New Texas Giant - which apparently still kicks butt. I don't think a record is necessary with this one so long as they push the "reborn" angle in their marketing.

I'm no electrical engineer, but here's an explainer. This thing, called a "Spike roller coaster" is like a tracked Bobkart, or, a reverse alpine coaster, in that you are given control of the accelerator during the ride. That accelerator tells the electrics how much power to use, which makes your car go as fast as you want it to, up to a predetermined speed limit. That speed limit can be different depending on the area of the track. You basically say "this section is only going to draw X amount of power maximum" and even if a rider is using the accelerator to go full blast, the power draw and therefore the speed is limited until they leave that section. Consider the sweeping curve after the initial "launch" section. You wouldn't want riders to go at maximum speed through that curve, so you limit that section to make sure they don't. Another thing that the system can do is safely slow down or stop a vehicle that gets too close to the one in front, again like on Bobkarts and alpine coasters, simply by cutting the power. I definitely would consider this as competition for the Bobkart. While I'd bet that the Bobkart uses less power and is much easier to build, the Spike has the advantage of being a traditional roller coaster system - it can perform way more daring maneuvers than a Bobkart can.

I for one wish more years were off years. I'd gladly take a year with no buzz-worthy new additions if it meant the park took the time to polish its core guest experience and make it a better place for everyone. Evolution, not revolution.

Okay, my fault for using "airtime" for the middle one. How about "subtle" (like on B&M hypers), "fun" (bouncy bouncy), "extreme" (almost painful, like Skyrush)?

Yes, but I don't think that the operators and engineers can just make assumptions like that. They have to know exactly how many trains are on the track and where they are at all times. I feel like if there's even any doubt, the coaster should go to full stop on all appropriate block sections until every train is accounted for.

Yeah, that's the point. They're catering to their regional market. It certainly isn't the tallest / fastest / longest / apparent greatest in all of Europe, but it doesn't need to be, and they can get away with "best in Denmark". In terms of their regional market, they really only need to worry about the other parks on the Jylland / Jutland peninsula, such as Farup and Legoland Billund, which are both a few hours away driving.

That looks like a drafting sheet. I'm suspicious, though that image obviously isn't the entire sheet. Based on where that title block is on the sheet, if you extended the layout to the left where the big sweeping curve is, it would technically go off the paper. Also, why would you have an elevation that's rotated 90 degrees compared to the orientation of the text?

I agree. Floater, airtime, ejector. That's it. Any more divisions and you're splitting hairs.

"The restraint will automatically stop when it touches your shoulders". Yeah freaking right. You have to hold your hands up above your shoulders to get the harness to a point where it ISN'T crushing your entire body for the length of the show. I realize that's the way they had to do it to get the sensory effects when they did Alien Encounter but...

Not to mention that the concept art is, or is at least really close to, a NoLimits simulation with a custom set of trains.

What's an Aqua Trax?

Very little? You guys are talking about literally removing at least a third of the layout and replacing it with something else. Do you realize how much time, money, engineering, money and money that would take?

That's okay, when the enthusiasts try to go tell their superiors, their ship will blow up, and we'll have to assume it's real.

I honestly would consider what they put out in the survey and the unlisted YouTube video as a playblast (click for those who don't know) of what would be their main marketing material. I would absolutely want to render out and composite the animation at either 1080p or even 2K when the time comes for official press blasts and the like. But, for something that exists merely to demonstrate the ride concept to only the people who like the company enough to take the survey and click through, I think it gets the job done, rough as it is. I have no idea what sort of resources or computer render power they have, nor do I know if they outsource the rendering to farms like Render Rocket - however, assuming they're designing rides, they likely have CAD-crunching machines, workstation-grade processors with "sufficient" graphics cards. If outsourcing wasn't viable, I would likely follow a similar pipeline. When the design is near-final, take a night to render out a lower-resolution playblast of the animation to give people a gist of what the ride is; Finish the design and have schematics ready to go to make sure I've covered all the bases to sell the thing at a show (like the IAAPA Expo in November); THEN take the time to render out a full HD animation with proper editing, titles and the like to make a great piece of marketing material. On my own desktop computer, I have a new gaming-grade graphics card, so I have the capability to, say, through the CAD geometry into a game engine or GPU renderer like Unreal, Lumion, etc and whip up a good-looking simulation. But I'm technically just a freelancer right now, I have to have a machine that can do both CPU and GPU depending on the project... Usual "based on assumption, speculation, previous experience, etc and likely not totally correct" disclaimer.

Yeah, SpinRock is one of the smallest types of spin-and-swings on the market.

We already have a "best portable coasters" thread, but maybe we can use this one as a "transportable coaster tracking" thread? So we don't end up with a bunch of threads with "Olympia Looping is here", "Alpina Bahn is there", etc.

The video is only in 480p maximum resolution, you wouldn't be able to tell anyway, but, honestly, I don't think it really matters.

My goodness, that coaster looks surprisingly normal.