nast89

Well, I'm new here, but I think I've noticed something. On a post on this site I read that somebody had talked to a Busch Gardens Williamsburg manager or something. He said he told him that Busch Gardens told Arrow Dynamics that for Drachen Fire they didn't want to see their regular supports. They wanted something more elegant and tasteful. You can see the base for the supports used in Drachen Fire in the Arrow Dynamics prototype pipeline coaster. I think the lift hill supports in Drachen Fire the way they were and the fact that many Bolliger & Mabillard sit-down and floorless roller coasters have the same design in their lift hills like Kumba and Bizarro is not a coincidence or Arrow having copied B&M. I think just looking at Busch Gardens roller coasters we can see that they do more than asking for things to be on the track. This is the company that had Arrow Dynamics interlock loops, change its entire building style, change its train design, build new elements; had Bolliger & Mabillard build a sit-down roller coaster, a hyper coaster, large inverted roller coasters: Montu and Alpengeist, and interlock flat spins. My theory is that Arrow Dynamics didn't steal anything from Bolliger & Mabillard: 1. The cobra roll was not invented by Bolliger & Mabillard. It was invented by Vekoma. If you notice the supports in Drachen Fire's cobra roll, they're very similar to the supports in Boomerangs' cobra rolls. Besides, Arrow Dynamics built it before they did. 2. As already mentioned above. The lift hill supports were built that way by Arrow Before B&M. So, wouldn't it make more sense to believe Arrow engineers, at the request of Busch Gardens to change the supports, designed new ones based on their pipeline coaster prototype and Busch Gardens saw the finished Drachen Fire and told B&M they wanted to see something like that in Kumba. If you look at their early stand-up roller coasters, you'll see they used standard spread up supports which were first used by Schwarzkopf, later Vekoma, and Intamin AG. Kumba was a big change for B&M when it came to support design. 3. Another similarity is the interlocking corkscrews (flat spins) which Drachen Fire first had. I agree like other people that the corkscrews in Drachen Fire didn't really interlock, but nearly missed each other. Kumba's flat spins do interlock, but again it seems it was a Busch Gardens invention and not a B&M invention. 4. Finally, if we're going to talk about companies copying each other; we could say that B&M copied the corkscrew and the vertical loop supports from Arrow Dynamics. In the end, Drachen Fire was such a big failure because Arrow Dynamics was a company known for taking innovative chances and this one was a fiasco.