halfabee

It sounds like they already have incorporated Treehouse of Horror year-round: Kang and Kodos appear in every Treehouse of Horror episode, and in almost no other episodes.

Batman The Ride at SFGAdv, 60+ times in a row without leaving the boarding platform. Just around and around and around. Empty queue, single train, generous ride ops... It ended up being somewhere north of 2 hours of nonstop riding. Dizziness, tunnel vision, hanger pangs/low energy because I skipped breakfast... I sat in or near the back row of the train the whole time too, which didn't help. But it was worth it.

Spellbinding. Wow, that really is a spectacular looking train.

I agree with KPfreak519, including his distinction between the other two posters' attitudes. It's important to be firm and keep a respectable forum in good shape on content - no question about that. There are other places for the attitude-challenged to go, and their posting histories will show exactly who they are. In a place like this, where the notions of respect and positive contribution are valued, legitimate "problem posters" invite whatever they get... be it ridicule, the business end of a flamethrower, or the Banhammer of Thor. For the rest, who are more earnest and honest but still might manage to wander outside the lines, could firm course corrections be doled out in the same spirit of mutual respect that otherwise pervades the site? These aren't the troublemakers -- they just strayed a bit. No need to resemble the bad behavior while rejecting the same, in my opinion. I, too, don't post much. But I tremendously enjoy this place and everything that goes into it - including the effort needed to efficiently weed out the genuinely bad apples. And Gatekeeper looks AWESOME. Can't wait to give it a spin! Edit: just saw the previous note to get back on topic. Hint taken.

Is that like a hairline fracture? Or is the ride so intense your forehead gets bigger?

Back when they were by far the biggest player in town for mega-looper style rides, Ron was told by his own engineering team on more than one occasion that it was time to invest in better design practices and software. As their rides got bigger, the impacts of inaccuracies and quirks baked into their engineering process and infrastructure were growing as well. But Arrow did not seriously pursue a major engineering overhaul until years later. It was a business decision driven by the knowledge that such a project would be neither free, nor instant, nor devoid of risk. (Cue comments about the cost, timing, and risk inherent in the path the company did take...) I don't know enough to believe the narrative that says Ron put up an ill-considered roadblock himself, though that was strongly suggested to me at the time. There actually are other plausible explanations for why things happened the way they did, and I've given enough voice to the one above already. Anyway, we all saw where it led.

After a bit of digging, I finally found my notes. Freeze was designed with a maximum bank angle of slightly more than 130° at the apex of that overbanked turn. Most of the turn is banked less severely, of course. As is the case with all of these maneuvers, it's only the maximum instantaneous bank angle that ever gets noted. This certainly wasn't the first time that a ride's advertised stats were a poor fit to its actual stats, but this case is a bit unusual because generally the numbers tend to get inflated rather than deflated... Interestingly - and I had completely forgotten about this - many people were calling that overbanked turn a "wingover" in the late 1990s. "Wingover" has a different generally accepted definition now. You there! Fetch me an onion for my belt!

But was Millennium Force the true holder of that record in the first place? Mr. Freeze is listed in RCDB as a one-inversion coaster. If that's true, then the ride's overbanked turn must be a non-inversion. I'd have to go to my notes, but I believe that turn is banked to more than 122 degrees off the vertical. If my recollection is correct, then MF never had the record in the first place. That could bring up the well-worn question of how overbanked you can get before you become an inversion, a la Drachen Fire's cutback element. But rather than wade through all that, I'll (try to) limit the question to just Mr. Freeze... Is it widely agreed that Freeze is a one-inversion machine? If this question is too OT for this conversation, then I'll happily accept redirection to a new or different thread without complaint.

Black Widow is fine, but I think they should have gotten a touch literary and named it The Pitt Pendulum. (I know... it's a Poe excuse for a name.)