Danrarbc

Few photos. The fountain looks nice for spring break. New fencing in several locations. They are in fact replacing the entire closed deck by Fireball. And yes a Ninja train is behind Boomerang. Likely an organ donor. Not sure if these are the old Hook's Lagoon slides but they're definitely replacing the Hook's structure with something.

Launch tunnel lighting is back on Mr Freeze. I repeat. LAUNCH LIGHTING IS BACK!!! RGB light strips now fire during launch and braking.

For the record when you mobile order free refills at SFOG they fill paper cups and they're waiting for you at the counter. No flashing of your existing cups needed. Because I just linked my pass to the order which proves I get free refills.

I'm at the park today without my member cups because my plan was to just drink from the paper cups they're doing for refills due to COVID during my two meals. The park will no longer hand you the paper cups if they don't see your souvenir bottle even if you mobile ordered with your dining pass. This is a change from last year when they would still hand you a paper cup. Our park has always done mobile drink ordering differently than some others in the first place where they won't have it waiting with the food. Member services also isn't open so getting new cups requires a wait in guest relations. Which has one window open. It's taking me an hour to get drinks. This isn't a good experience.

For the record the Hurricane Harbor location was significantly better.

They already built the power infrastructure for Catwoman in back by The Boss though.

Now that's interesting.

It's not letting me do any Sunday. Are those gone too? Yeesh!

I wonder how Magic Mountain and Discovery Kingdom will be loading coasters?

I believe the counties Over Texas and Fiesta Texas are in can still push for distancing even if the order says they can't mandate masks. And Six Flags has already been maintaining stronger protocols than some jurisdictions have had in place anyway, and a private company can of course have whatever restrictions they want in place. I believe Silver Dollar City has plexiglass up and is using every row too so the lack of doing this would seem to be specific to our park.

Six Flags indirectly confirmed both are gone on Monday.

I noticed the Primo change last year. Just didn't know it was for dining.

The park was rumored to be looking at options to have a longer Moon Cars route even if it meant a relocation. Not sure if that's going to happen, but the short and crappy route is in fact not on the website.

I can't remember the last time Six Flags released a new bit of information to local news first. They usually do their own media releases now.

Why let a little thing like reality prevent hypothetical layout fun?

No not as a normal operating process. Though maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to do so any time there's an estop requiring a maintenance call since that's downtime anyway.

I wouldn't say surface transmission isn't a thing. It just isn't the BIG thing and the the virus is pretty average at surviving on surfaces, so it's not really the thing we should be worrying about. But if someone snots on their hand and grabs a coaster restraint and then you touch that restraint and then your face some period of time after that there is still a transmission risk there. It's kinda like worrying about the electric fences after an outbreak at Jurassic Park. Sure - electrocution is still a risk if you touch it, but there are more pressing matters.

In fairness it probably never was a good idea to have 350 people handling the same tongs and spoons at buffets. And sometimes it takes everything going sideways to realize things maybe just weren't ever a good idea. I'm of course simply assuming they'd want to avoid a 'touch point'. I don't actually know if pouches on rides that already had them were used in 2020 - I'd assume they were still used in at least some parks since Disney has some and you know that those fans were cataloging every operational change they possibly could after reopening.

They could do a text replace on Invision too. I wonder if the carpenters are building bins or shelves like some of the other parks already have? That'd solve some of the clutter problem. Ninja has the plastic totes already. Add pouches to coaster trains like some of the other parks might enable more stuff to ride on - then again that's a touch point.

I haven't ridden both variants but it's possible the single-wide does a better job of pushing the positive Gs straight down through your body when the two-wide might be slightly off-vertical. I can't imagine the experience being much different in any other way though.

Wait what? Kids areas are fairly important for waterparks. Unless...

The park has tweeted out that the tube slides have received some TLC.

It does, but is 15ft shorter than Colossus. Colossus seems to be the biggest amusement/theme park wheel outside of Asia.

Remember the park spent a lot of money on a new control system for the ferris wheel too.

Out of curiosity I ran the numbers on what an addressable RGB LED system could cost for Eagle a couple weeks back. Which would be overkill for chasing alone (much more complex effects could be run, and you could do seasonal colors). For 12V RGB LEDs a DIY system is less than $6000 in parts. Including all of the 11.5ft strands needed, the ESP32 boards needed to drive them all and 4000ft of ethernet wire. Enclosures for everything and weatherproofing can likely be done with the tools the park already has on hand. There are alternatives to the ethernet runs since this kind of distance would need switches to deal with the ~300ft length limit of ethernet and I didn't price switches into my estimate (WiFi-only boards are actually cheaper, but then you need enough access points to cover the layout and ethernet would likely be more stable). From what I can tell this is actually price-competitive with the cost of simple white chaser hardware. Commercial basic light strands cost more than you'd think, chasers would be even more. You can imagine the scale of this project though. At least 330 strands of LEDs - with one ESP32 board needed per 20 strands and power taps every other strand. At least 182 connections to weatherize, along with the 17 boards.