Richard

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Yeah it's pretty clear from the heavily twisted pieces due to be installed in this section that we're not looking at a loop like Flash. Let's kill that idea right now. The No-Limits simulation did a great job of working off the footing locations and designing a ride in the Mack style so of course it's going to get some things right but once again, let's not get carried away. It got the S-bend and twisted camel back hill completely wrong. The loop is now certainly wrong too so neither of the first two inversions were right. The helix currently under construction is way off and also makes the third corkscrew inversion implausible. That leaves the just Stengel Dive and inclined dive loop as correct thus far. Even then there's the issue of pacing; the height of the elements and the use of speed and forces plays a huge part in shaping the ride experience.

Who are these people that care about the safety process yet somehow missed the months of news coverage and Ardent's own announcements that went into detail about every single thing that was said in that video? This 'update' is a rehash of information that has been widely publicised for about six months. The information itself is inoffensive enough, but the perplexing thing though is that they made no efforts to script or present it as something that's vaguely shareable and social media friendly but rather something out of a new employee orientation seminar. The actual interesting thing to find out would be what has changed internally or with the park's overall culture towards maintenance and operations as a result of these unprecedented audits, but I don't think that would make for a feelgood corporate video. Points go to Alton Towers for managing to blame ride stoppages on guests' behaviour and weather.

What an insipid piece of corporate nothingness from Dreamworld. A company accountant telling us about ride safety from the least-relatable perspective possible: internal and external policy/procedure audits. It literally looks like a Powerpoint presentation and the script reads like that part of a monthly corporate meeting where you quietly check Facebook under the table.

Next step is to censor the word twisty...

Main Event is the biggest contributor to profits these days. New centres have previously had around 30% annual return, meaning they pay themselves off in about three years. Dreamworld's solid $30-odd million profit each year has been propping up their USA expansion plans, not the business itself. Ardent sold their gyms, sold their marinas and have been putting every cent into their USA rollout because the returns have been so good there. It's the execution of this USA strategy that was the undoing of Deborah Thomas, not Dreamworld's accident. Many see it as a rushed and poorly conceived plan that has more and more cracks appearing as it matures.

To add to what @themagician said it's a 56m tower with the marquee added to the top. Regardless of the options that S&S advertise now (a decade after the attraction was built), it clearly doesn't have a 4-5 metre marquee at the top that it'd need to reach 60-61m.

This is something I looked into a little while back and despite Batwing being advertised as 60m tall, I can't find anything that indicates that the structure is any higher than 58m including the marquee at the top. Anything over 60m should safely be the tallest structure in the park.

Our bad. We deleted the tangent about 'salt' before it turned into a three page discussion culminating in "Cholesterol: The Ride", and accidentally deleted the post that kick-started it that also said something about Harley Quinn. Carry on...

Not sure I'd put much faith in any of the second/third/fourth hand 'facts' that keep spreading here. I don't see how anyone's determined that it'll be anything like Intimidator 305? That ride has a layout that's heavy on ground-hugging turns to emphasise speed. It represents the classic conundrum with gigacoasters in that once you reach certain speeds then the cost and space required to go up becomes astronomical because you need to go either really high or really long to manage the forces. Movie World's hypercoaster (which simply can't be 70m tall, sorry folks) doesn't have that problem. Hypercoasters generate manageable speed where it's not cost or size prohibitive to burn it off with hills. The track that's going up now is for the turnaround section of the ride so it's naturally pretty twisted. The footings however indicate a pretty clear out-and-back layout with a twisted turnaround and some interesting twists in the middle. Blacking or greying out is a result of high, sustained positive g-forces, such as experienced in banked turns or loops. Different people have different thresholds and it can vary based on hydration, alertness and other things. I don't know why we're suddenly throwing that into the mix here in a discussion about the construction despite no indications of anything resembling sustained positive g-forces.

Almost certainly that that feeling of control comes from the designs rather than the track itself. B&M has always built rides that lean towards conservative. The train styles themselves would have limitations (2x2 vs 4x1) that need to factor into the designs though certainly nothing that comes close to the limitations of the human body. B&M seems to just prefer not to push the boundaries. For my money I'm firmly in the Arrow camp from a visual perspective. The real shame is that by the time they figured out how to build high quality coasters it was too late. I don't think steel coasters get much more visually pleasing than Tennessee Tornado. In general I find just about everything from the main Euro manufacturers to be a little too sterile and utilitarian. In that sense RMC is definitely a breath of fresh air.

Stengel Engineering is an interesting company, least of all because a lot of what they do appears to be shrouded in non-disclosure clauses. Their work runs the gamut from simple number crunching to full design services. Mack did use their services for "optimising" the layout and dynamics calculations (German source) of Blue Fire at Europa, which was the first of their large-scale coasters. I've not seen any mention of the company since for Mack. But by all accounts the roller coasters they're producing these days are world-class and every bit as perfect as the best Stengel-designed Intamin or B&M coaster.

In the interests of everyone's sanity, let's try and keep these guidelines in mind when sharing photos from parks. 1. Don't ask for photos Rest assured if someone is in a position to get photos of something interesting, they will. 2. Don't ask what to take photos of By the same token, don't ask in advance if anyone wants photos of something in particular. If you see something cool, snap a photo and share it. 3. Don't tell us you're going to be taking photos We don't need to be told hours or days in advance of your impending visit. No one cares. Share the photos you do get, but you don't need to announce it in advance. 4. Check it's new before posting Try and keep up to date on the discussion and minimise duplicates.

Yeah that's a bug that's on the list to be fixed...

That sketch has absolutely no bearing on the finished ride, @LORD_Noodle. It's comically wrong.

With supports and track up now I think it's safe to say that this competition is now locked for new entries. Feel free to discuss the designs submitted as the layout takes shape. Once we have a pretty clear idea of the finished layout we'll announce winners, losers and lucky door prizes.

I'd like to know too... I'm seeing nothing of the sort. This race to join the dots is going to get really old really quickly if people don't realise that there's lot of different ways to join dots.

Welcome along @Jaycob. As Santa07 noted above, we prefer specific topics. Feel free to join in any of the topics currently going, or start a new one if there's something new you want to talk about.

Yeah obviously not for Lost Gravity... that was just an example of a Mack ride that has some crazy twisted track. Perfectly plausible that it's for Movie World's coaster however. If you figure that they work on one project at a time and that they've been sending track as soon as it's finished, then what's showing up now would have been at that stage late last year. The most interesting thing to me is that it shows how single spine track is connected to double spine on the far end.

Those two sections of track twist in opposite directions. Definitely not the same. And you only need to look at Lost Gravity to realise that the 'most twisted ever' statement made on Instagram was likely hyperbole.

It's worth pointing out that in the official blurbs, none of the launched coasters here use the word "launch", Arkham Asylum doesn't use "suspended", Storm doesn't use "water coaster". Is "Australia's first hypercoaster" as strong a selling point as "Australia's biggest ever roller coaster/ride/attraction"? Does this relatively obscure term add anything to the marketability of the ride that you don't get from just selling the sheer scale visually and with top line stats. At any rate, everyone knows that you can only advertise the length of big things in football fields, the height in Statues of Liberty, the cost in cups of coffee and the weight in African elephants.

Sure, let's call it 60.96m. (But if we're at that level of pedantry then it's 40mm, not 4mm.) If this coaster turned out to be below 200ft tall then it's an amusing example of scope gap between Movie World and Mack Rides. It's not a hypercoaster, but this in no way affects the end product. It certainly isn't worth pages and pages of debate, particularly for a term that has a pretty clear-cut definition, and for a ride that has no real confirmed stats beyond @Skeeta's length discovery. Remember the preliminary figures on RCDB were wrong for the only other example of a Mack hypercoaster and manufacturers like to reuse designs and concepts wherever possible. Mack ended up getting the height right on their first hypercoaster; would they miss the mark for their second? That probably says everything you need to know about where we'll land on the height of this thing. What we really need is to take ownership of the term megacoaster which is thrown around loosely in a lot of different contexts. Megacoaster: any *big* coaster that's free from gimmicks. Big, fast, long and does interesting things.

Do we call this #hypergate yet? Interesting to see that ~80% of this community is the equivalent of a dodgy ride attendant who looks both ways to see if anyone's looking, then lets the kid on despite being an inch 2.5cm too short. The definition of hypercoaster is black and white: 200ft in height or drop. If it's under then it's not. As noted in the original (largely tongue-in-cheek) article, RCDB sometimes gets it wrong with early stats like this. Lewa Adventure's Flash was first listed at this same 60m/196ft figure (Dec 2014) beore the page was edited to 61m/200ft (Apr 2015). As for Space World's Titan Max (and this is where it starts to get needlessly pedantic), RCDB is listing the Arrow ride model -- Hyper Coaster -- not a classification of hypercoaster. The marketing could (and should) simply avoid the term if Movie World's coaster falls short. The term has no bearing on the quality of the ride and there's plenty of ways to market the largest ride ever built in Australia without introducing a term that no one's ever heard.

Yeah I should have perhaps mentioned that there's separate wheels mounted to the trains for this purpose. For anyone interested, here's the best picture I could find of said wheels, also from that same TPR topic: You can see both clearly here. One is above the wheel assembly, the other is mounted to the chassis towards the front of each car.

Good call... updated yesterday's update to reflect this possibility. Here's another look at a Mack maintenance bay: (photo from: http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1436109, plenty of other good ones there too) I'd guess that these remaining footings will go in when they start work on the concrete slab.