KDCOASTERFAN

The deal with Paramount Parks and Vekoma was that Paramount Parks had exclusivity on the Vekoma Flyers provided they purchased "x" amount of these coasters in a certain time frame. When Paramount Parks did not purchase another flyer, SF/Premier Parks stepped up immediately and purchased two flyers. One went to Six Flags World of Adventure (Geagua Lake) and opened as X-Flight. The other of course is Batwing. Let's at least get the history lesson correct. What would a contract between BGE and SFA have to do with anything? There has been speculation for a very long time that BGE has an exclusivity clause with B&M that prevents B&M from selling new coasters to KD and possibly even SFA. The problem is it's been all speculation with no proof. Neither park has installed a new B&M. In my opinion, I believe that there may be in fact an exclusivity clause with BGE and B&M for the simple fact that Cedar Fair has dropped B&M hypers in 3 of the 5 former Paramount Parks. They've put in Behemoth at Canada's Wonderland, Diamondback at King's Island, and are currently installing Intimidator at Carowinds. KD is getting an Intamin Giga. Why hasn't there been a new B&M in the past fifteen years at KD if there isn't an exclusivity clause between BGE and B&M? Why hasn't SFA purchased a B&M? They installed seven coasters over a six year period. Three Vekomas, a GCII, an Intamin, a Zamperla, and a Premier Rides coaster. Makes no sense because,new or used Dominator would not have been installed at KD if such a contract existed & even then said contract might've only applied to their hypercoasters seeing as AC was BGE's big new ride of the time. SFA never got their B&M simply because Burke & Co. chose to give those rides to parks like GRAM,GRADV or SFMM during their "let's spoil these three parks rotten at the expense of the others" phase,they supposedly were gonna get SFNE's floorless but the county wouldn't approve the vehicle design due to emergency evacuation procedures so that's how we allegedly lost that ride.

New construction pics are up on the intimidator site as well as a new blog update.....according to Pagel each segment of lift track weighs 3200 LBS. so they're being extra careful when planning out the rigging for these sections of track,which are now on site & will hopefully be put up real soon. Work is also beginning on the 2nd tower which suprises me because I'd find it difficult to install the supports for the 150ft. hill with both towers being in the way.

See this is why I stopped going to the park after the 07 season,when you barely have enough rides in the park to begin with & don't want to invest in new ones & start taking what few rides out that you do have it leaves even less for people to do than before....sure some of the rides removed were high maintenance(IE,Chaos) but two face could've been repaired & reopened & people would still ride it but they let media publicity impact their decision to remove the ride. Had the park recieved more funding for better maintenance odds are that that accident NEVER would've even happened,I've had some close calls on rides there myself & a case in point was having my restraint open up on mind eraser a couple times(in different seats) about six years ago.I stopped going after the 07 season & 9 years as a passholder in favor of KD after they announced that yet another waterslide would be installed for 08 when the ride side of the park is more in need of new additions than the waterpark is.If things improve over the next couple years then I may consider giving the park another chance as there was & is so much potential t here that SFI doesn't seem to care about.

I'm telling you for a FACT that Batwing replaced the proposed Stand up on the Master Plan per a conversation I had with former Park President Janet Porter. Yes, the length was something like 3000' and 140' tall which was purely a "cover our a$$" measure. The park over compensates in height during the permitting process because of all the term oil they faced when they applied to build Superman. Does this mean that Chang isn't coming to SFA? Not necessarily. Since the last public release of the Master Plan, which was about ten years ago, nothing else has come out since. Over the course of a decade, things change. Plans change. Did the Master Plan include all the upgrades to Hurricane Harbor over the past ten years? No. Why can't you let go of this? Let go of what? I knew that batwing replaced the standup that was proposed on that site plan,the park can build up to 200 feet max(although not in all areas of the premisis) & they did have something listed for HH as a 2006/07 activity pool & slides which in the end were never built.

Just an update on my Blue Flash project,trackwork is finished & I just have to do the rest of the supports.

SROS and Wild One have no wait at all most days I go but I find both those rides to be far better then anything at Kings Dominion. A rides line length doesn't make it by default better or worse. FoF isn't "terrible", I never said it was, I said Jokers Jinx was better. Why? Lets go through your own post. "One keeps its speed pretty much throughout the whole ride, disregarding the mid-break run, while the other lacks constant speed." Uh, yeah. One keeps its speed throughout the ride more then the other. That would be Jokers Jinx, aka the one that has NO mid-course brake run at all. How on earth do you think FoF has anything resembling "constant speed" when it literally comes to a complete stop on the brake run? That's just ridiculous. If you think the UFO theme and somewhat darkness makes the ride better then that's fine, but seriously, trying to say FoF has better pacing, continuous speed, or is better simply because the line is longer, is really ridiculous as far as I'm concerned. SROS & WW have virtually no wait? That can't be unless it proves my theory that attendance has dropped so low in the two years since I last went to the park that both rides are virtually empty.Next to batwing superman would usually be a multi-train wait mainly because they would deliberately reduce capacity on the ride by allowing flashpassers to ride one train & if no flashpassers were around they were required to send it out completely empty. As for the standup that was cancelled it WAS to be from B&M as neither togo nor intamin built their standups to a height of 140 feet & the dimensions for the project were listed on the PG county planning board document as being 3,000 feet in length & 140 feet in height .

Well looks like it's down to SFGRAM,SFSTL & SFA as to who will play host to KK's former standup then.

Not true because SFA DID have plans to install a standup coaster from B&M back in 99 along with several other rides that the park never recieved due to corporate's lack of attention given to the park's cap ex plans following the 01 season.The standup was cancelled when batwing was built in it's place simply because KD had passed on the flying dutchman coaster in favor of hypersonic after the prototype,then known as stealth was such a disappointment for CGA. Next year will mark 10 years since the last coaster was installed at SFA,does this give them a chance at getting chang? I'm not entirely sure because SFI tends to favor their larger parks over SFA lately but they do need something big to bring people back so who knows? they just might get lucky & recieve the ride but I'm just not getting my hopes up yet.

Not necessarily true. GCI announced that they would put MF's on any wooden coaster as long they could more than likely retrack the coaster and it didn't mess up the forces. Somewhat of an example, Wildcat at HP. It was already a GCI coaster but it used to have PTC trains. The change made a slight improvement in terms of ride ability. I usually ride it 3-4 times a visit now versus once in a couple visits with the old trains. The camera is still in a lame spot still. I think Wildcat had a much needed re-tracking a couple of years ago that didn't help too much. The MF trains are great trains. I'd love to see a little TLC to SFA's Roar. The second GCI coaster is becoming rougher each season. It's getting to the point where I wouldn't ride it more than once a visit because its just too rough. From what I understand GCI refuses to sell SFA a set of MF trains because they outsource Roar's current PTC trains for off season maintenance,which is a really stupid excuse seeing as GCI built the coaster in the first place.

I put it in a separate folder that I created for downloads but it still won't open,all my other downloaded tracks in that folder open just fine.

I tried downloading it yesterday but when I went to open it in the editor I got an error saying that it could not open the track file.

Looks good so far,how soon til it's ready for release?

Anyone see screamscape's update regarding possible 2011 attractions? I'm beginning to think Chang might be making it's home there in 2011 after all....still the park will need to make many more improvements to get me to return by then.

Yes it sure does.

So that's why hurler closed early? I was in that general area taking a break saturday evening around 5:30 or so when I saw an op come down the queue & go under the chain....then again after the horrid rides I had saturday it should just be closed permanently because sitting on the righthand side of the train was far worse than the left,which is just as bad. Haunt was great saturday night for the 2nd visit in a week,I love the effort & atmosphere that the park provides during the evening hours & the near walk ons during the day.

The reason for removing the turntables was simply to reduce downtime,however the ride was down several times during my visits in 07.

I don't see why an inclined loop wouldn't work on a sitdown/invert vs a standup....the cobra roll & heartline roll can't be done on a standup however due to the increased G-loads put on the passengers & trains.

poo-poo breaks. These are probably 1-2" cables at best. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I've not had a chance to see one on my own.) I DON'T see why its so amazing. Its fatigue. The ride is 1:15 long, so assuming 1 minute to load and check the train (unrealistic, but a best case scenario) and a 10-10 operating schedule, the ride cycles 320 times a day. The cable is bent 4 times per cycle (twice going up, twice going down), so that means it is bent 1,280 times per day. And assuming a fully loaded train weighs 10,000lbs, (1000lbs for each car, plus 3000 for 28 riders) that means the cable lifts a total of 3.2 MILLION pounds every day on a best case operating scenario. When you think about these things, its not very surprising. I'm more concerned for the catch car itself than anything if it actually fell down the lift and into the station. Then why don't we see this happening with elevators? They have to make repeated trips hauling heavy loads sometimes 24/7 & yet we rarely hear of an elevator cable snapping in an office or apartment building somewhere.

Now that you mention it I did see quite a few guests walking around with ID badges dangling from their necks.

Don't forget that the track guage is different for that of a B&M stand up vs floorless,the track would essentially have to be rebuilt at the factory from scratch to run as a floorless & it would just be more cost effective for SFI to ask for a floorless to be designed from Chang's layout as a totally new ride rather than a retrofit of the existing one.

^What a real crock of bull that is. Sorry but SFI is relocating the ride in as is condition,that means no modifications will be made to run it with different style seating/trains than it was manufactured to run with.

Well the webcam was working today but there didn't appear to be too much progress being made.

Actually the above view is completely to scale, the ride fits perfect. I wouldn't mind it going to those parks either, but SFFT and SFDK already have B&M multi-loopers that the GP would surely find very similar. I still think SFA needs it the most. While it's true that SFA could benefit most from the relocation that is the precise reason why odds are so high that it won't happen simply because they want the park to fail...otherwise it would've gotten,rather than lost many of it's rides that were removed by both the previous & current corporate owners. Another thing is that the ride has to be sent from KY to Ohio for refurbishment & it would be far cheaper to send it from there to SFSTL or SFGRAM than all the way east to SFA in MD. so that's another deciding factor right there.I'd love nothing more for the ride to be given to SFA(the park closest to me) but I'm not getting my hopes up knowing how they've treated the place over the past ten years.

SFFT doesn't have the room & SFDK doesn't allow for the height requirement of the ride structure(it's 4 feet too tall) so SFSTL,SFA,SFGRADV SFOT OR SFGRAM are possibilities. I don't see SFGRAM since they have a standup,SFA is due for a coaster especially after losing two face but they won't get it simply because SFI would've given them a spinner by now if they wanted to add a new coaster so that leaves only sfstl,sfgradv & sfot as the real contenders IMHO.

Looks like I got the brake problem sorted out,now I just gotta do supports & Blue Flash will be ready for release.