Dean Barnett

I'm happy to be proven wrong - but all the kickback i've gotten so far is just pretty poor personal insults - no logical discussion. No one knows why Rivals has seatbelts (but Levi doesn't) and why they won't let anyone do their own seatbelts.

If a guest gets on a ride then it dispatches immediately - great.. but it's gonna suck when they have to wait 10 mins for a second go when there's no queue. The ride from the TPW POV is 1m55s (ish) from the start of the lift to clearing the brake run block. 40 seconds of that is spent on the lift, so you could theorteically run the chain slower til the previous train clear that block (like levi does). So by my math it's physically possible to dispatch a train every 90 seconds. Europa manage to dispatch Blue Fire trains every 30 seconds, with bins on the unload side of the station. I just feel like every damn guest gets a really shit experience from the really slow operations and its bad for the whole industry. Just ask the European/US youtubers that just did the parks (Coaster Studios was complaning and they had the impossible to buy magical white wristband!)

Eh I respectfually disagree - every metric that crews get rewarded on is dispatches per hour/day - as everything else is determined by it. Queue time for "standby" Queue time for "fast passses" Amount of fast passes you can sustainably sell without drastly impacting the total queue time Amount of per cycle addons you can sell (backwards/spinny seats) At 5 min cycles .. 12 cycles per hour.. opening for 6 hours a day - you can only sell 144 seats for the entire day. When I was waiting for rivals this weekend there were 12 cycles worth of people waiting for the backwards seat.. that's a one hour wait after paying $60! The dispatch cycles on both Rivals and Levi can easily be doubled .. with simple stuff like opening the airgates once the previous riders exit the train... but I go back to my previous claim - they're artificially restricting cycles per day to reduce maintenance costs. The only time I can recommend anyone to visit the gold coast parks is midweek, outside of school holidays - but even then the chances of all the rides being operating are very rare.

Because it's the one factor that actually maters with ride operation speed - the queue length is irrelevent because they have no control over that.

What was the cycle time? Queue time isn't really relevent when you add queue skips into the equation

Even movie sets have PA systems

The ops somehow got worse for my trip this weekend. Instead of the grouper being able to count - by hand or with a counter or some other device that could count for people, so now you get shouted at even earlier! "Put your hand up if you have an empty foot print next to you" closely followed by orders to walk through the door when it opens.. because there's not even text on the door to say "wait here til this door opens.. or anything" I'm convinced the current setup wasn't plan A. Seems dumb for you to be let into the little area before the door.. just to stand there for a bit then get let in through the door .. walk quickly though the most themed walkway in the park, then get shouted at once you get to the platform to stand behind the white line. Also the cycles were taking so long to dispatch (over 5 minutes, sometimes up to 😎 that the whole preshow video ran out and the room fell into mostly silence. They should put screens here With the same vibe Jet Rescue has (which is 15 years old) - then when the door opens it just shows directions to walk through the door. Anyway I've said it before and I've never seen anything different.. the ops are so stupid. They were releasing guests out of the train to put their footware in the lockers.. and everyone had to wait for that to happen. There's no instructions that you need to keep your shoes on so I don't really blame guetss when there's absolutely no rider breifing. Also just let them ride without footware.. the chances of being evacuated are really low, and you can just take their footware to them if you need to evacuate (same as they do on Rivals). VRTP - please find ways to mitigate ride operators shouting at guests.

After last weekend's experience - I'm convinced VRTP purposely slows down park operations to reduce ride cycles. Rival's queue was pretty much up to the split in the queue - and they were still running one train. The queue for backwards (at $30+ each?) was 15 cycles long, and the dispatch time was about 5 mins per train.. so the wait was well over an hour. I really hope the other train is broken.. but again there's not really an excuse when the rides down for a month now. I'll just add this here too because I don't want to reserruct another thread - but Superman ops were really bad too... 4-6 min cycles. The same person securing the train was doing the grouping... so the train completed the unload, rolled into the load station empty - THEN it got grouped. There were also a few seats on the trains that were running.. so I reckon it was running at 270rph when the theoretical output is 820rph.. about 1/3rd. At least the aircon is better in the (really boring) queue

Never claimed expert knowledge. Most of my posts here are personal opinion (on a discussion board) along with experiences while I’ve been to abroad. I do work in entertainment (large scale events … my last big gig was Qantas’s 200th at the airport) and broadcast television (several networks along with live sport etc) IMG_6147.MOV

I really love how a maintenance thread has turned into another personal attack. Real cool.

See I don’t think you can charge the full day rate for a few rides for a few hours. What if they had a wristband that worked for 2 hours park close - which only included 2 rides. I still think having ST open is a great idea - yeah it’s the flagship ride at the moment but you can run it with 4-5 crew and still make 💯 pure profit with the spinny seat (if the train is working tho)

I work in live entertainment and broadcast - so I know a fair bit about entertainment technology.

Not the same.

The chances to ride (decent) rollercoasters at night in Australia are way too slim... anything to change this would be welcomed.

A wristband for like $20 that includes the Claw and ST would be perfect

It doesn't need a media server.. a raspberry pi could have done the job. The cheaper option that makes sense is just add buckets to the platform and call it a day.

Yeah it’s so dumb. Kinda makes their reasoning for this pricing structure (staff booking) irrelevant when heaps of people can show up for the last 4 hours. also there’s a fairground setup in Fairfield right now that’s doing unlimited rides for $35.. and $2 entry.

The VIP there is very popular - so I can see it selling out pretty regularly in the peak season (it was when I was there early spring break). I saw an entire birthday party with 15 adults and kids using it. It’s interesting they don’t skip the preshow with instructions for Mario, when the single rider line does. To note - single rider at the park is pretty rad. Transformers is always a walk on, Jurassic world is about a 5 min wait, Forbidden journey is usually walk on - the worst performing one is Mummy.

It's pretty much the same except the load sequence - instead of a rolling station you get put in little pods with their own operator who clears the vehicle then it joins the track at the next opportunity.

I don't think so - Batman: Knight Flight at Warner Bros World Abu Dhabi has a Kuka ride sytem

Hopefully they bring tightarse tuesday back or something..

There were so many VIP groups for my visit.. would have seen over 15 - where as I only saw around 5 at USO.

Lunapark pricing is so cooked. $44 for 3 hours? The same price for the entire day if you decide you wanted to go to Luna Park 3 weeks in the future? Still the only park (that I'm aware of) on the globe that has a ticketing pricing structure like this. I go past the park daily but haven't been on the new rides... but I have been on Guardians + Iron Gwazi ....

Anyone taking bets on how long it takes for them to be covered in oil?

Spike progress