Tanks4me05

Does anyone know where the maintenance and admin buildings are in the park? I've been wondering for a while, because they do a really good job at hiding them. I know that the expansion is gonna have all the maintenance underground, but I couldn't find any info or pictures of the existing park.

Nope. It's definitely not just you. I'm in the middle of making an itinerary and cost estimation of a possible 2022 Scandinavia trip, and I'm getting the same results. It's been happening the last few days for myself as well.

Got any additional footage of Kobe Portopialand floating around?

^^Possibly. It looks like there might be a brake rotor attached to each seat spindle, but the videos so far don't show the back of the train for long enough for me to see if there's a caliper and where it would be.

^Nah, it's freely rotating. The flipping is "initiated by the track" in the exact same way as it is on regular spinning coasters, suspended coasters and Zac Spins; the changing radius and orientation of the track moves the center of gravity of and imposes centripetal and gravitational forces on the cars such that it causes the seats to rotate.

Falcon's Flight very much seems to be an Intamin Blitz coaster of sorts. Assuming the 32 km/hr second lift speed of Falcon's Flight is accurate, I made a quick vertical drop in NL2 with a 4 car Intamin Rocket Coaster train because the physics in the program is quite accurate, and I marked the point along the drop at which the train reached 250 km/hr in order to see what kind of a drop will produce such speeds. That would mean that this monster's max height is somewhere around the 830 foot range. The top view shot of the master plan didn't show the whole layout of the park nor did it have any obvious references that I could use to predict the scale of the plans, so I'm unable to make any predictions about its length. If the Jeddah tower is having so much trouble getting finished, I have serious doubts that this will actually come to fruition as well. But holy crap do I want it to happen.

Bad news: The 2021 multi-coaster expansion was just denied permission to be constructed by the local municipality on the grounds for noise pollution. Seriously, what's with the British Isles and their noise pollution zoning laws? It seems like half of the major projects in those countries keep getting axed for that reason. https://www.thejournal.ie/tayto-park-rollercoaster-refused-4719190-Jul2019/?amp=1

^In that case, I stand corrected.

I'm currently at the park, and cranes are now on site for Primordial. One of those cranes is massive. Logic would state that for any construction project, you should use the smallest possible crane to do the job due to their expense to rent. The big crane is a Kobelco CK2500 II (the model name is plastered on the crane itself.) The thing has a max height of 300 feet according to Kobelco' s catalog, while the next largest model is 250 feet tall. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that this new ride is gonna be a 250 - 300 foot tall behemoth.

You know, if you're just going to bitch and complain about the poll I'm more than happy to disqualify your ballot and throw it away. I apologize for any misinterpretation. It was just that the last time I listed that long list of errors, the response appeared to implicitly come to the conclusion (which I came to agree with) that they were the result of something weird going on just with my phone in particular, and not necessarily the coding of the poll itself. I'm aware that this is a complex program, I just wanted to highlight that "Error 1" may in fact be an issue with the coding of the poll. Again, I apologize for how it was worded. I have a history of struggling to catch any false, negative connotations that can be conveyed in what I say despite my best efforts to catch them beforehand. My actual intended connotation was to be purely neutral and "diagnostic" for lack of a better term. (And if I didn't catch any negative connotations in this post, I apologize for those, too.)

^I see this wasn't just me, then. (I won't be surprised if the accuracy of the polls is appreciably reduced because of this.) The solution I found out was to sort them first in a note-writing or word processing app/program, and then I used the spreadsheet version of the poll where I changed the numbers for all the coasters to match the notepad list in one uninterrupted session and then saved at the very end.

Here's a lengthy bug report for you guys, in decreasing order of frustration. (Operating System: Android. Browser: Google Chrome) Error 1: If I either refresh the tab the ranking page is open in, or leave the ranking page in the same tab and go back to it, most of the bottom 20% move to random positions elsewhere in the list, and a large number of the coasters overall will have their number randomized; I even got a -2 rank displayed for Pepsi Orange Streak last time. This has happened many times and is especially frustrating because I have gone on something like 260 rankable coasters and it's taken me a week to think through each ride and reorganize everything. Error 2: If I continuously scroll for more than roughly 50 positions in the ranking section in either direction (up or down), it will not stop scrolling in that direction until it reaches the top or bottom of the page. If I am currently dragging a coaster to a new position in the rankings, it will place the coaster at whatever position in the ranking it was when the "scroll loop" began. If this happens, then the only recourse to stop the scroll loop is to do a browser refresh, which then triggers Error 1. Error 3: Sometimes when I touch the right side of the screen to scroll, it instead drags the coaster I tapped on; this usually happens somewhere in the right third of the entry. Error 4: A couple times after the site autosaved my changes, the numbers (but not the positions) for a significant portion of the entries randomized. Error 5: Somehow two Freedom Flyer (Fun Spot Orlando) entries made it into my list. I could independently position them and give them individual numbers. I had to remove both and do a screen refresh which (you guessed it!) triggered Error 1 in order to solve this. It hasn't happened a second time, however. Error (?) 6: There seems to be a delay of 3 - 5 seconds between placing an entry in a new position and being able to select another one. Now that I think about more, perhaps that's actually a deliberately placed timed "selection pause"? Error 7: The page appeared to scroll to different position when I switch to another tab and then returned to the ranking page a couple of times. Error 8: A couple of times I tried to drag an entry to a new position, but the entry failed to move.

While a Lincoln Park Comet clone may be 20 - 50% longer than (and thus probably roughly that much more expensive than) a Stricker's Tornado clone, Comet was only 10 feet taller than Tornado. And additionally, it's been my impression that kids have increased their thrill level threshold compared to decades past. For example, Jack Rabbit at Seabreeze, which although it is 10 feet taller than even the Lincoln Park Comet, it definitely appears to be a family ride for the area as I've seen many a six year old get in line. Heck, some inverting coasters (e.g. Sooperdooperlooper) are considered family coasters nowadays. So while that doesn't change the amount of money needed for a Lincoln Park Comet clone and would be larger than anything you have now, is it really outside the park's demographic range? And you guys are only an hour and 49 minutes away from SFGAM, so I wonder if it's possible you could tap into and advertise in the Chicago or even WI Dells markets a bit more. I won't lie, I'd love to see the Lincoln Park Comet get rebuilt, and part of me is hoping that maybe, just MAYBE, it could be done, and I can't help the coaster-loving mechanical engineer in me go into problem-solving mode to see if it would be feasible somehow. Now I want to make it clear, I'm not saying "You guys have no idea how to run your own park at all", not even in the slightest. But I'm still curious, might you be able to provide some more insight as to how you guys came to that conclusion? What would you have to say about the points that I brought up?

^Hey, I need more coffee. Gimme a break.

It is because of maintenance. Here's a letter that the Morey family posted on their website: https://www.moreyspiers.com/flitzerletter TLDR: They know how it's a signature ride, and they REALLY don't want to remove it. However, the ride is almost 50 years old (it was really built in 1969, they bought it used in 1983), Zierer no longer provides replacement parts for Flitzers, recent inspections showed that the structural fatigue is bad enough that they simply can't continue trying to maintain the ride safely, and New Jersey's laws make it infeasible to rebuild the ride.

But the park will just run into the same maintenance situations by getting the same type of ride. It's not just the equipment replacement, because all ridescneed to replace parts, though that plays a very big part. The bigger (or should I say more unique) issue is actually the insane electricity bills that they have to pay because of all the power it takes to physically move all that water for such a long time.

^What did you (or anyone else for that matter) think about the roughness? Was it during the rolling portion, the valleys/stations? The tops of the inversions? All over? What did you think about the restraints themselves?

^But if you want the park to get to work on repairing the tens of millions of dollars' worth of neglect that has been accumulating over the last two decades in hopefully a relatively quick manner, then so be it I say.

^It's a prototype. Prototypes almost always have problems. In the amusement industry nowadays, nobody wants the first ride, but everybody wants the second.

Source????? Maybe with the free ticket promotion for concert ticket holders it inflated their numbers... but I find this **REALLY** hard to believe that they had anything even that close to 1999 numbers. Wikipedia, actually, and I was also (pleasantly) surprised myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_Lake I mean, there's not necessarily a guarantee that it's correct, but the site as a whole does have an accuracy greater than Encyclopedia Britannica.

^^This is because they have an insane amount of work to do to repair all of the infrastructural neglect. There are easily tens of millions that they have to spend to get everything back up to snuff, and they always keep finding more and more problems. On top of this, the attendance tanked from around 1.8 million back when RoS opened to about 950,000 in 2006. The park has been in recovery mode for the past eleven years after being sold, and they only got back up to 1.5 million people in 2017. They just don't yet have the people coming in and have too much stuff crumbling behind the scenes they have to spend their money on to be building B&M's every year. They have to spend within their means. I can see them quickening the pace of getting new rides somewhat once all the repairs are finally done, but again, they have to be responsible.

The cool thing about The RCT trilogy is that they really did their homework. Every single ride they usedis was either physically made or registered as a patent. This one in particular is US Patent 6,269,750B1.

^In that case, I (very happily) stand corrected.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it always seemed to me that the websites that are reporting the three new coasters for 2020 might have misinterpreted what the park released: My thought was that they are bidding on three different coasters, and will choose which one of the three will actually be built when they get the final proposals. Looking at the park on Google Earth, the only significant plot of land the park appears to have to place coasters of those sizes would be the field between Formula and Mayan at the back of the park, which would fit only one of those rides based on the dimensions we were given. (In fact the 150 meter x 90 meter size for the inverting Aquatrax and 110 meters by 85 meters for the mine train each fill out the field almost completely.) If, however, they own the field directly bordering the south of the park which currently looks like farmland, then that would in fact be way more than enough room for all three, but I'm not so sure about that.

I would have preferred if there was a third "They're okay" option in the poll. I think it would be worth taking these photos occasionally (for example, that Wildfire one you posted IMO is fantastic) -- especially if you already have the equipment paid for and use it for other more frequent purposes (i.e. the 360 videos) but I wouldn't put a gigantic focus on them. Like all special effects, it certainly has its place, but should be used relatively sparingly.