DrachenfireOP

He did say Interactive Dark Rides so Men in Black, Lost Kingdom Adventure, Voyage to the Iron Reef, Every Boo Blaster, Scooby Doo at SFFT, Wonder Mountain Guardian, Toy Story Midway Mania, Buzz Lightyear have all been removed apparently.

Sure is a shame innovative dark rides like Curse of DarKastle, Spider Man, and the likes only stayed around for 2 seasons...

But I still love Magnum, the suspended coasters, Gemeni, Loch Ness Monster and the mine trains. I think Arrow's big problem is that they didn't keep up with the times, but they still designed some good rides (particularly Tennessee Tornado). Other ride manufacturers, such as B&M and Intamin, passed them by. Pretty much. Arrow dominated the field from late 60s to the early 90s. No one came close to matching them. Schwarzkopf certainly made good loopers, but couldn't keep up with the popularity of Arrow and what their designs could do. In 1990, if you asked any enthusiast who the king of coasters was, the answer was Ron Toomer. If Arrow had brought in young blood sooner, it would still be pumping out great rides i bet. Tennessee Tornado is proof of that, but was too little too late. Rides like Shockwave and Drachen Fire would have been amazing if younger engineers pushing for more computer use and train redesign had been around and successful. Instead, those types of engineers went to other companies like Premier, Intamin, and if course B&M came around. That said, there was also a culture change about coasters. Coasters used to be a point if pride, like "look what I'm tough enough to go on." When that was the mentality, a rough ride was only more points for bragging rites. Now a lot of people want forceful, fast, and smooth, and people bitch about some of the smoothest rides I've been on as "too rough." But as always, to each is own.

Wait, have the people shitting on Magnum ridden since the seatbelts? Before them, you needed to make sure your bar was pretty tight in order to ride. Now you just need to do the same withe the seatbelt, and there will be no issue. Post seatbelt Magnum jumped up to my top 5 for all time best coaster, and definitely all time favorite hyper.

While I would personally rather see it get topper track, Hurler could be replaced. Also they have lots of unused land if you look at Google maps, assuming they're willing to expand outwards.

I missed my disaster transport credit because I didn't even know it existed my first trip, and I forgot to ride it on a few subsequent trips. Oh well.

Seriously though. "Giant frisbees suck, are hated by the GP, and look terrible" says no one who's ever ridden one. I put delirium above some of the coasters at KI, and am sure the KD will be the same. I mean, I'm in the minority that didn't hate shockwave, but I'm actually glad to see a good ride go in its spot that doesn't involve taking out shit tons of trees in a great shady portion of the park (which is what a lot of people wanted to happen). Would a new coaster be nice? Sure. Do they "need one" when they have double digits already, including two of the best coasters in the world? Objectively, not really. Meanwhile a damn solid flatride, they do really need and thankfully the people making the calls both know and have acted on this.

You have a Volcano and an Intimidator 305 and you're disappointed when you have to wait another year for a roller coaster that most likely won't be as good as the two. I would complain about my home park being the relocation capital of the world, with the last original roller coaster was built in 2005, but the rides that have been relocated to there are good rides. It's almost like the quality of the rides cancel out the waiting time, or whether or not they were relocated. Truth. Nothing in the park topped Volcano until I305 came around. The odds that a coaster at KD will ever top 305 are stupidly low. Most people have it in their top 3, if not their top 1. Meanwhile, there are PLENTY of good coasters at KD, but the odds that the next thing coming in will be the new most intense ride are close to 0. People were blacking out on 305 so they had to change it. That means it's as intense as that park is like to get. If you set your expectations on a new, crazy, intense, death defying coaster, when you already have one, you're going to be disappointed. I could see them getting another great coaster, but as others have said, the park doesn't make decisions on enthusiast pipe dreams. They make decisions on a series of numbers crunched by a bunch of experts. If the numbers come up coaster, then they will get a coaster. It will probably be a mid to mid-large sized ride, maybe on par with Dominator, and it will probably be a really REALLY good ride, and enthusiasts WILL still complain anyhow because "zomg we've been teh cheated our glorious new 6g 15 looper 500 foot amazing coaster."

Well, yes and no. Usually they do have a series of sensors that tell it where all the trains are. Sure, not with 100% certainty, but they know what train is in what block. When something goes wrong, USUALLY the computer defaults to fearing the worst. If they tried to do a full power reset, when they turn the PLC back on, it's going to check blocks for train locations, see a train, and throw a fault. Now, that fault probably wouldn't be ellaborate, but basically something to say "I don't know where a train is, verify train count selection." Now again, I don't know about Smilers PLC compared to some of the older Arrow and B&Ms I'm familiar with, but it can be REALLLY hard to get rid of a ghost train, and probably harder still if the computer can't find all the "real trains." This is the same scenario, except that it turns out the "ghost train" was real. If the PLC was set up in a way that would allow a simple block reset to allow the intrusion, that's a worrying problem with the PLC. I'd say they either jogged the chain, or changed the number of active trains so that the computer would let them reset the blocks. Either way, to do that without manually accounting for all trains is inexcusable. It's also inexcusable with the ops. When we had a ride shutdown, we had to report the location of all the trains. It was the first thing we were to do when reporting the ride down. "Hi there, down for a shutdown, and there we're running three trains, and they are in the station, on the lift, and on the block brakes." If every park doesn't have a procedure like that, they really should for exactly this reason.

^ 100% agree, we were taught the same at Busch Gardens, and I'm pretty sure both chains have great safety records as a result.

This is the most puzzling that I think is what we all would like to know. There should (and were) many things that would have been alerting them to the stalled ride vehicle. The panel had to be throwing out warnings and errors. There are cameras in that area. Even park guests saw the vallied train and there were reports that guests tried to alert the staff. So why did that all go ignored and the staff choose to send the train in override mode anyway? That's the big question that is what I'd like an answer to. Unfortunately I think I can speculate with near certainty for a few of these. For the guest alerting the ops, that happens every day, and it becomes a boy who cried wolf scenario. The GP used to inform all the time about how they got stuck upside down in a loop for over an hour, how the lift chain broke, how their harness came flying up mid ride, etc etc. Now, at my park, they told us to call a supervisor every time. On the surface that sounds like an idiotic waste of time, but on the off chance something really was wrong, it could get addressed (and if not, at least a supervisor was dealing with it so we could go back to our job in peace). If guests really were pointing it out to ops, I could see the convo going like this: Guest: hey there's a train stuck on the track! (Means vallied train) Op: (looks and sees train stopped on lift) oh its ok, it's perfectly safe. Guest: but there might be a crash if you restart the ride! Op: hey its ok, trust me, our computers prevent that, have a nice day! As to the moron that put the ride in maintenence mode with guests on, holy crap is that ever idiotic. I mean, that isn't even just a huge SOP no no, it's about as far from common sense as you can get. I won't speculate too much on the cameras because I dont know that much about smilers setup, but on the coasters I worked on, the monitors were tiny and only on evac areas. It was mostly for confirming train location in a setup or fault situation. Still, why the mechanic didn't first check for all trains accounted for is beyond me. Why they put the ride in maintenance mode with guests on, and no knowing where all trains were, is inexcusable. The fact that they did all that AND THEN jogged the lift chain WITH PEOPLE on the ride breaks every rule in the book all at once (you're not supposed to use lift jog with people on the ride since it bypasses the block system). Fuck up doesn't even begin to cover it, and sadly people's lives were ruined over it.

^ the article says they still work for the park. That said, I'm glad they are, for now. If they were fired but turn out to be innocent after the investigation, that's pretty shitty and they can then sue. By moving them to a place that they can cause no harm, but keeping then employed, they avoid that. After the investigation if they are found at fault, then they'll likely be fired/sacked.

This does feel like a way more credible article, and really is the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. I'll be interested to see the official investigation results of course. The worst part of that article to me is that one of the girls who lost a leg was a dancer. Even if it was just a hobby, that's earth shattering. However if that was her major or if she worked at a professional company, her career is now over because of this, and that's just horrendous.

Arrow trains are designed to keep your hands in the car. You will never see vests on arrow coasters with loops because the clearance ceiling is not enough. Next time you are on an arrow and about to do a vertical loop, notice that you could 'high five' the beginning and end of the loop if your hands were free. Why don't they make the sides of the train taller? Or would that look too weird? There are ways to fix that. I actually used to give that same reasoning, but there are always creative solutions to the reach envelope problem. I like the way RMC fixed this problem personally:

What? The GP are jumping to conclusions about a ride they've never been on? Thank god enthusiasts never do that! /sarcasm

^ all Arrows could use that I think. I don't mind Arrows (possibly because I'm tall, possibly because I'm not made out of glass) but enough people have headbanding problems that I think most parks would do well to upgrade the restraints to something more modern. That said, I never take enthusiasts opinions of rides too seriously, because I find there are VERY few coasters I don't have a good time on. For the most part, I find most of the GP are also more than happy to get on a lot of rides enthusiasts complain about (like Firehawk) and have a good time (since that's the whole point of a theme park). I also don't think there's any "bad" Arrows left at this point. Shockwave, Drachen Fire, GASM, and some of the older corkscrews caused real problems for people. Vortex, Anaconda, Viper, etc. are fine rides that people will still line up for no problem. There's nothing wrong with wanting to skip them in favor of the new wave smooth coasters, but I think people often forget that it's a preference of theirs, not a fault of the ride. Some people like rides you need to be defensive on, since that's a different kind of thrill.

I stubbed my toe this morning, but really, it's the door makers fault. Appalling as it is, there is NO warning sign on the door informing me that it is a door! There should have been a giant warning saying "WARNING: This is a door. Approaching a door in an open position while barefooted may result in injury if foot come in contact with door." Another option would be for them to make the doors wider, decreasing the odds that I will pass on the "loose door" side of the opening. With the door only a few feet wide, I didn't realize the danger of being too close to the hanging portion, and was therefor overconfident as I walked through.

Nothing about that is ironic. Interestingly, your post rolled over onto 1306 though, which is still not ironic, but according to Alanis Morissette it would be.

There are fans of that ride? 0.o

~ Robb Alvey (I'm so sorry, I couldn't help myself).

In 1998 I waited 4.5 hours for volcano, on a weekday. That was my second attempt. The first day I tried, we waited about 2 hours and just got to the covered quee before you go into the mountain before the ride went down for the rest of the day. Yes, but what you were saying is that a new ride would shorten the line at rides like volcano. Clearly that isn't true because they built 4 new crowd pleasers since then, and volcano still has long lines. Yes, any normal coaster relaplacing shockwave will have higher capacity than shockwave, but if they were going to make volcano have short lines, it would have happened with Dominator, or i305, or hyper sonic, and quite frankly, that didn't happen. Volcano is just a very popular ride with very crappy capacity.

^ I mean, I get where you're coming from, but they have 11 adult coasters, and 13 total. Volcano has always had long lines since it was built. When Hyper Sonic XLC came out, it was a 2 hour wait almost every day. Volcano still had a long line. Same for i305. Dominator, i305, hsxlc, blsc, each came, and even when their lines were huge, so was volcano. While mathematically speaking another huge new coaster would put people in its line, it will be more of the same. Long lines at all the big ones, longest line at the new one and volcano. Just be glad they added 4 more rows to volcano. Waiting in the line when it had 4 rows SUCKED.

Now that's a hell of a first Arrow! Did you ride it before the trim brakes? Even I, the rough Arrow fanboys couldn't handle that sucker without the trims!

About a weekish. Even though the circumstances are pretty clear, they will still do a full investigation, and very likely the state will come out to inspect and recertify the ride. (Make sure the fences, signs, ops, etc are all up to standards set by the state). CF may choose to keep it down beyond the mandate for PR or internal reasons, but I'd guess they want it back up and in the past ASAP. Of course, if they move fast, it might be up in only a few days (the the train involved may be out of service for a bit longer than the ride itself.)

Common sense isn't so common I'm afraid. I truly agree with the person wondering how they don't see the train when in the area though. I mean, like being in the area is stupid enough, but you CAN be in a restricted area and out of the path. Like, how oblivious do you have to be to a) enter a restricted area b) not think "I should keep my eyes peeled for the lethal hazard in this area c) not see or hear said hazard coming d) avoid said hazard, which is completely possible, e) immediately regret your decision and get the hell out of the area. Like, truly though. I know trash talking the dead isn't classy, but I've been way too close to this very situation too many times, and spoken to these idiots too many times to have sympathy for the idiocy that values a cell phone above your own personal safety, and ESPECIALLY the safety of others. I have no sympathy for this person. Again, my sympathies to all the other people this affects, it really is sad.