Tanks4me05

^Sadly, You are correct. it take six seconds for the train to crest the "curved stairs" part of the lift in the POV as opposed to this video: which takes four seconds, meaning the lift speed should be roughly 17.3 ft/sec as opposed to 26 ft/sec which should be about a 0.1 to 0.2 G decrease of the airtime. It's not that big of a difference, but it won't be QUITE the bat-outta-hell pacing that we could have gotten, assuming they are keeping it at that speed and not bringing it back up.

^Because our oh so generous (read: greedy) nation sees any non-official usage of copyrighted music, even where someone doesn't directly get money off of it, as illegal.

^^Look at my post at the top of the page. Legal limits permit -2 G's of airtime (the absolute max) before 0.2 seconds of negative G's have passed.

http://nolimits-exchange.com/news/g-force-lesson/35 nolimits-exchange says these are the official files that the engineers use for their designs, so being a mechanical engineering student with the intent of designing roller coasters, I use these when I am building coasters in Newton/NL (I have made a couple dozen over the past year, but since I know industry professionals actually look up TPR, that's why you have only seen one: Upper Gorge Express.) So -2 G's CAN be reached, but it must step away from that value after 0.2 seconds. The G's have to be above -1.5 after 0.5 seconds.

^Nah, you can still build enclosures with carnivorous dinosaurs, they just have to be smartly designed. Making enclosures is the easy part. If we can make fortresses that are resistant to direct thermonuclear attacks, we can easily make safe enclosures for a few animals. The largest carnivorous dinosaur discovered, the Spinosaur, was "only" about 11 or 12 feet tall at the top of the spine (when not lifting itself up) and 40 - 60 feet long depending on the animal. 45 foot high, reinforced concrete walls that are several feet thick, with observation platforms along the top for guests should be perfectly suitable enclosures. Yeah, they are big and dangerous, but they are still animals, and fortunately, they could still be pretty easily secured or killed if need be. At our technological capabilities at this point, we would still be the kings of Earth.

If the enclosures were properly built, ie the guest viewing areas would be 80 feet up or so perched on top of properly built walls that were structurally tested to withstand one of those crazy things attempting to break through, and having snipers with 20mm anti-vehicular rifles (like the one that took down Wikus's mech in District 9) for the big dinos and .308's for the smaller ones, then I'd be happy and I'd gladly pay a poo-load of money to go something like that. Basically, treat it like a zoo with super strong enclosures and I would be happy. Oh wait, there are herbivores too. We could put the less dangerous ones in a drive through safari or whatever.

^^Ahh, that would as well, if I had reason to believe that Skyrush's trains were actually heavier, but I believe that Skyrush may actually be a little lighter (not by that much though; I wouldn't say more than 10-15% lighter without access to the plans.) Look at them carefully: Both cars have the same capacity, and I305's cars have "sides" to them. Skyrush's outer seats may have those extra supports under them to attach them to the sides of the inside portions of the car, but the design is VERY minimalist; there aren't any "sides" or even any seat backs covering up the restraint locking mechanisms (which I usually actually like aesthetically because I like looking at the mechanics.)

^^^The problem with I305 was that it sustained G's too high too long. Though I don't know the calculations myself (yet) my best guess is that since with an increase of G's, there's an increase of normal force and thus kinetic friction. The increase in friction should result in an increase of heat (I'm taking thermodynamics next semester; I'm just trying to do my best inferences here, which is why I used "should" instead of "will") and since the G's were sustained for more time on I305's first turn, that means that the wheels had more time to heat up without cooling down to their normal temperature. Since we don't have that amount of sustained G's on Skyrush, the quick G transitions will allow the wheels to cool down in a quick succession, thus they probably won't have to go through the wheels nearly as fast as I305 originally did. Time must be the more important factor rather than actual G's, because if that were not the case than Boomerangs would be far more legendary for their eating through wheels than they already are for their ubiquity and roughness (though I don't think they're unbearable in their roughness.)

^I'll put a high chance of seeing a POV on opening day, guaranteeing within 48 hours thereof.

^Oh wow, that's it? I'm basing it off of the fact that DL got Motocoaster at a reduced price of $3.8 million because it was already built. I got the figures from discovering a surprisingly accurate rule of thumb that for steel coasters, the average price is about $4500 per foot of track (I know that's not how it's really calculated, but that's the best I can go by without having access to the bill of materials of each project)

^Because they probably already did a cost benefit analysis and found that it would be less than the roughly $5 - $6 million it would take to get a whole new ride which the guests likely won't notice the difference, unless they went with a spinning wild mouse of course.

^^^DP is infamous for its short lines throughout the park, except for Wild Mouse which its lines are famously long because of the weird two adults per car rule. So get to that first if you want the credit, but otherwise, do whatever. a super long line for Talon is reaching past the stairs, which I only remember happening on one of my visits, and I've been there many times.

No, it looks like to me that people perceived the slowdown throughout the rest of the course. Well, compared to Keystone Thrill's May 7th video (the first good video we got of Skyrush) I decided to do a timing test. The time it took for the front of the train to travel between the two supports for the second hill in the Keystone Thrills video was 1.5 seconds. The time it took to go over the second hill in the most recent one was... ... ... 1.5 seconds. Since the speed over the second hill is the same, and there are no trims or launches throughout the ride, then that means that the speed over the other hills are the same. I think the main issue the enthusiasts here started getting worried was because of the fact of the slow acceleration of the lift hill, which frankly makes sense from an engineering standpoint and even an enthusiast's standpoint; lifts don't need to be fast accelerating, as long as the velocity is sufficient. Lifts themselves aren't of any thrill at all unless they are vertical lifts (first one for me was Fahrenheit; a LOT more fun than I expected.) But if everyone is worrying about the turn over Comet's station, then I simply don't understand: It's obvious that the final turn would have been lower to the ground hadn't Comet been there. It's not meant to be thrilling at that point, it's only supposed to deliver the riders to the station.

Does anyone else think that the Northeast could use an indoor amusement park? True, we have a lot of parks in general, but virtually nothing is open past Halloween. We definitely have the climate to justify for an indoor park, and there's enough people to draw from to get a good crowd.

Finally found out how to obtain the BBCode from my photos on imgur, so I decided to re-post, and I have a couple new photos to share anyway. This set is from my trip to the Syracuse Gun Show a couple of weeks ago. The next batch is miscellaneous pictures I took this year so far.

I had a dream last night that I was in Japan, and I was walking the lift of an older Togo coaster with locomotive themed trains, and I was trying to safely lower the train down a maintenance ladder with my bare hands, and said train was dangling freely like a rope.

^26 ft/sec is roughly 17.2 mph, or one of the fastest lifts that I know of, if not the fastest. Especially with those velocities, you would need a crazy powerful motor to run it at over 100% power, so I'm placing my bet on that being the real speed. Well, it's 4:00 AM here in New York State. There goes my ability to sleep for the next few days.

After doing some testing of my own to see how much the lift speed would affect the train: I made a 200 foot tall lift in Newton with an 80 foot tall camelback right after. Using an 8 car B&M sitdown train (the closest analogue to Skyrush's trains in NL) the airtime over the tops of the lift hill and the first camelback "increased" by -0.5 G's. Basically, that's the difference between Maverick's launch to Storm Runners's launch. We already saw that it will get quite strong floater already, so I can all but guarantee this is going to HAUL throughout the course of the ride. Three months until New Hotness...

Of all the maps, I think the company that does Hersheypark's (and Seabreeze, and a few other parks; it's obvious that it is the same company based on the style) maps is pretty good as it's very clear to see what items are where. But what I don't understand is why don't parks just use Bing Maps or Google Earth printouts that have all the stuff labeled? It's more realistic, so you will have an even better idea of where to go.

^I've always wondered... what the crap is your avatar picture supposed to be?

I'm moving over to imgur because flickr has a 200 photo maximum for the free service. I didn't transfer over all the pictures from my flickr account yet, but you've seen those in the thread before. Take a look here: http://tanks4me.imgur.com/

I came across Van Canto last week, currently listening to their cover of Manowar's "Kings of Metal" - I'm not too classic metal savvy so I don't know how many of their songs are covers, but either way they do it fantastically. You would never expect that a cappella metal would actually work, and yet it does:

I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a minute here: It seems as if the new opinion that any speculation or guessing is highly frowned upon, something which I do not understand and quite frankly I find ironic that a coaster enthusiast site dislikes it when people hype up a coaster before it opens. I thought the point of TPR was to discuss everyone's passion for coasters past, present and future, and not just purely be a news forum for reporting new additions to parks. The same thing goes for times when I saw a lot of people getting bashed by talking about why some engineering process was done for the design of the ride, like in regards to speculating on what the return route for Skyrush's lift cable would be. Of course a lot of us aren't engineers, and only a select few of us are in the amusement industry, but that shouldn't exclude the majority of the members from participating in the conversation. Frankly, I enjoy speculating, or at least educated guessing, as I find it a lot of fun trying to determine the methodology of the engineers. And judging from the ride, it is fairly compact, and El Toro HAULS when the hills are only 2/3 the height of the lift, all these hills are less than half the height of the lift. There are also no trims, so despite the fact that we don't have any easy way to calculate the velocity of the trains and the radii of the hills, I think it's safe to say that there will be a high probability that ejector airtime will be all over the place. It's not like we're a panel of jury members deciding the fate of a person who is on trial, so as long as no flame wars or similar are started, I honestly see no issue with speculation. I've been quiet about this for a while, but now I think it would be a good time to step on my soap box and give my €0.0150840938

Just as an FYI, most of Yahoo's news articles are very poorly written. The only reason I still go there is because I don't want to go through the hassle of changing my email address and having to notify all the websites that I go to, and all the people that have my contact information.

^IIRC, it does not. The winged seats are actually above the station floor on either side.