Ed Farmer

I've always thought that a bigger deal is made of this than needs to be. No one is foiling anyone's grand scheme by actually taking time out of their day to visit random fabrication plants and posting about it on a message board. It's not like someone has a complete bootleg of the next Batman movie. Even if someone narrows it down and guesses correctly- only people who have this hobby will care. Barely. Someone managed to get a close up of a shipping label on a piece of metal? Sweet, I'm just going to go stand over there, away from the people who sneak around industrial parking lots taking pictures of metal...

It's a gesture of good will from corporate for making them build a Eurofighter last year.

Please let this happen. It sucks that Kennywood took it down, but relocating it to Busch Tampa is the next best thing after Kennywood.

I think Knotts is getting a B&M something for 2013, but not too sure about it being a Wingrider.

It looks great, but so do dozens of other B&M coasters built since the early 2000's.

I've been on great SLCs and I've been on mediocre SLCs. They're never as bad as people would lead you to believe, but on-board audio won't do anything to make them better. I was hoping that little fad was done with and confined to the past. I'm curious about the new trains- I've heard both good and bad reviews.

Just my opinion, but if you're going to designate rows exclusively to Flash Pass, do it in the middle of the train, not the last row. If for some reason that can't be done, keep it to every other train dispatched.

You haven't, many have. Every message board seems to have a few that make outrageous claims like this. Didn't mean to make it read like I was directing that at you.

On the contrary, the hydraulic launchers require less energy for the launch. The large amount of energy you may be referring to is created by the hydraulic motor. I ran into this earlier- http://www.coastersandmore.de/rides/kanonen/kanonen_eng.shtml Kingda Ka or Dragster probably need more than Kanonen, but I can't see it being dramatically more.

This. Kite flying or knitting might be better suited hobbies once B&M coasters are too rough. It's especially hilarious when the complaints are concerning their non-looping lapbar only coasters.

That's exactly my point. I contend that they (Six Flags) could get away with that.

This backwards train business must be a nice money-saver. Management can spend minimally and still have something to point to as a new attraction. Falls right inline with the making use of existing assets approach they seem to be taking. I'd love to see them try this approach for the spinning mice/spinning coasters throughout the chain- just to see if they could get away with it. I bet they would.

For a long time now, I've been worried more about the filth I'm exposing my skin to than actual headbanging whenever my head makes contact with a restraint. Nothing worse than taking a seat on V2 (or just about any ride with OTSR) after a long humid day and sensing/smelling the dampness on the restraint. Bet if you scraped a sample from those V2 restraints into a petri dish, you would find previously undiscovered life forms. Maybe even a cure for cancer. Abbot has it's labs about ten minutes down the interstate, so no excuses.

I think it would make a great station for an Intamin plug and play. The size and space of Iron Wolf's old stomping grounds lend to speculation about Eurofighters and whatnot, but why waste such a nice building when there is plenty of other places that that I think would be a better fit for one of those, like here: or here

Nah, not quite.

One of my fondest memories of Busch Tampa is being given tickets for another day during a rainy day during Montu's first year. We decided to leave around 2 pm on a day that the rain just wouldn't go away and ended up getting admission for another day. They weren't closing the park early or anything, and the thrill rides were the only non-operational attractions. We were driving back up to Chicago the next day, but managed to enjoy a half day at an empty park before we left.

The more intense the theme the less intense the ride seems to be the trend for more recent installations, especially across the pond.

Sounds about right. Once the pre-opening hype for X-Raptor vanished after it gave it's first few rides, it was easy to see this concept was a gimmick and dud (looking at it from a quality ride point of view- I have no doubt crowds will eat this concept up). Looks like the solution for the comfort issues Arrow and Intamin ran into is to simply design any forces out of the layout. The potential for theming might make them attractive for Disney parks. Dumbo The Ride, perhaps.

Is that a trim I see in the second aerial pic? Right after the immelman, but it's hard to make out.

I thought the same thing about Flyers after Air and Georgia's Superman. Luckily, I was wrong!

The drop looks similar to the ones that can be found on their flyers. Fortunately, the rest of the layout looks like it will make up for it.

Bittersweet. If I had my druthers it would still be sitting in Gurnee, but the fact that it dodged the scrapyard or relocation to the other side of the world is the next best thing.

It depends on who you ask. I don't think so, but evidently there are a few who do. :shrugs: Yes. B&M hypercoasters are generally thought of as smooth coasters.

"The safest winged-coaster on the planet." There are like 11 people in the state that would understand the reference. It would fly over everyone else's head, and they would take that claim at face value. I can just see a group of friends seeing that sign while waiting inline, and then the attention seeker (every group has one of these) fabricates a story with restraints popping open on the loop the loop*, explosions, and lightning strikes that electrocuted everyone riding. *In this instance it would refer to the drop off the lift (besides, any and every inversion is a loop de loop. duh) "Safest" isn't a word that I would use to advertise a new coaster- or anything else in the park for that matter. It implies that this is an achievement worth noting, and not a norm that should go without saying. People would conclude that there are "less safe" Wing Coasters out there. The brighter ones may even come to the realization that hey, wait a minute...If the other ones keep crashing and exploding, then what's stopping this one from doing exploding and crashing...

I talked to my guys and they said ok. I told them about your route suggestion and they said no. They told me that it will duel with every ride in the park instead. That isn't what you asked for so I told them to kindly go back to Russia or Sweden or wherever it is they came from where they could make it duel with whatever they want. Around this time next year I'll send them a Christmas card with a photo of a roller coaster built by their competitor that took the route you specified.