ntweisen

From what I remember, Barnstormer actually looks worse. The rest of the area looks good though.

Not bad for your first model! I've always wanted to build a model coaster.

Bing finally updated their aerial images finally giving us a clear picture of the entire park from the air.

This is very sad news. They had one of the best log flumes of all time!

Great pictures! I'm still pissed about the name and tram tour changes. Oh well, guess I should get over it.

Have you ever heard of "The Great Firewall of China" - the term for China's web censorship? Wasn't there another really big mall that failed? Probably because they didn't have the world's tallest indoor coaster.

That looks pretty cool! How much planning and design went into this? Did you create any CAD models prior to building?

So Premier has the Superman coaster and Goliath train projects in the states (and a new Harry Potter coaster?), this indoor coaster and another mystery international project? Good times! The world could use some more Premier coasters.

Do I spy a splash down element or two?

I wrote a paper for an economics class in college called "Profit Maximizing an Amusement Park: Gate Versus Food Prices." Let me know if you have any questions.

I vote for Storm Runner as well!

The Swarm's car look pretty wicked!

Mantis at Cedar Point is pretty loud. The Incredible Hulk is also really loud, I could hear it from inside my hotel room at Royal Pacific. In fact, most Beemers have a mighty roar!

This ride just keeps looking better and better with every piece of steel added.

Great looking ride! Beautiful pictures too.

It's a gyro coaster! Seriously, though, looks cool! How many inversions? I'm having a hard time counting them all.

A few gift ideas for theme park fanatics.

Absolutely fantastic interview. I wish more park and designer representatives would be as frank as he was. Could the new ride be a "gyro-coaster"?

Has the Manatee exhibit been permanently closed?

I recently entered CATIA's 2011 design visualization contest, which will evaluate realistic rendering images that use CATIA functionalities. Whether a real-time screen-shot or a calculated rendering, the designer's image will be submitted to a panel of CATIA experts and fans will be able to vote for it via the application. The contest runs from July 21 to September 9, 2011. The two best competitors, selected by the fans and by the CATIA experts, will win an Apple iPad2. My entry is, of course, the cantilevered coaster- a revolutionary concept pushing the thrill ride to the next level of unpredictability and excitement by utilizing two tracks which follow different courses causing the vehicle to swing in a side to side yaw movement, pitch front to back, and an up and down vertical stroke. Please vote for my design here! Thank you. http://apps.facebook.com/dassault-catia/profile/150.html

What five sites would those be?

I applied! Can't wait to see the final layout renderings (though I hope they hold off on those until a little while after vertical construction has begun. I love trying to figure out the layout just from the pictures of the footers).

Thanks for the kind words! I've never been on Harry Potter but from all the pictures and video I've seen there are multiple domes (four?) on each turntable, and I think there are three turntables located throughout the ride. It also appears that HP's track is flat with no banking and doesn't change elevation but again I'm not totally sure. I agree that the single bench of seats would be better but for my model I didn't have a lot of time to design a new car so I just used the car from my cantilevered coaster simulations.

Sometimes in my job as a CAD engineer I get to have a little fun. Today, in order to get more practice with kinematics, I challenged myself to create a working simulation of a Kuka robotic arm roller coaster. In order to save time I used the car from my cantilevered roller coaster simulations and download a robotic arm from Kuka’s website. The purpose was more to show proof of concept that this was possible to create with the software. Inspired by the Harry Potter attraction at Universal.