Gazza

This pretty much sums it up: http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/article.php?aid=9 The park itself was OK, not a touch on how the GC parks are now, the only real notable attraction we said goodbye to was the Bush Beast, but to a lot of people it was quite special.

But having a look at this pic here http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/gallery.p...d=2&image=2 you can see the Nickelodeon "ball" and the track are the same sort of orange colour. IMO the orange they have used on the track is closer to the red end of the spectrum than the yellow end. In any case, its nowhere near the colour of Cyclone or the Motorbike. But ill leave it now since its a bit irrelevant. Agreed, I can totally see them going down the same path as a lot of other parks with their accelerators....expect some motorbike motor sounds and a tree of lights at the launch. Though I might say it is limiting to typecast motorbike coasters as a racing themed ride IMO. It doesn't, this is DW we are talking about here. Its not so much the thinness (which is pretty irrelevant) but the fact the track is only 2 tube. If you look at SE you can see the track has additional tubes and bracing to help it deal with the forces (the top hat is a prime example of this). Since the motorbike lacks this additional bracing we could expect a less forceful ride. As for speed, well 40km/h like Road Runner would be a bit slow for a launched, racing themed ride, I'd expect something in the 60-75km/h range. In effect, this has already happened with Wiggles World. And since Model T lane is gone (Its open now in its new location by the way), pretty much all that is there is a fast food outlet and the Paddle steamer Dock. Personally, I can see some re-theming happen. I would like to see them shift the dock elsewhere in the park and start off with a fresh slate in terms of doing something with River town. Though, I might say your theme could be a little 'dark' for a family audience ( (M),A,V,D) , though I think a park like Universal could be capable of something like that. And, something funny I found. Ages ago I posted some of my ideas for DW in a thread here. Im sort of cringing a bit since my ideas were a bit wierd, I would like to think I have matured a bit. Though it is funny that some of them have occured. http://www.parkz.com.au/forums/in...?showtopic=1198 Later on in the thread.

Great shots there Richo, it really shows everything off so you can see what they are doing. I think layout wise it could be a sort of figure 8 layout (since there are two sets of footers at the far end), basically a mini Rita. Also, now that I see the bent supports and the earthwork around it, I think that it could actually be a walkway that goes along the riverfront. They might want to cut away those branches though. But Rugrats is orange

Hmm, interesting how Intamin are doing their supports differently now, using square I beams rather than the tubes like on SE. And with those bent supports you are talking about, I had thought what they were doing was having a track running underneath since at the GD end you can see smaller supports closer to the ground. But really, I have no idea what they are going to do with this one.

^But if the cable was shorter then it would be under greater tension, if that were the case then it would probably be launching trains too fast, not the other way around (since during the launch pre-stage, I think the system uses the tension on the cable to measure launch power needed, higher tension means a heavier train, and therefore more launch power) A simpler explanation is one that comes into play on many coasters throughout the world; cold weather makes the lubricants in the wheels more resistant to motion, and since the trains aren't rolling as nicely rollbacks would happen. Gemini at CP is a famous example of a ride effected by this issue.

Well, Freefall rides have a lot of life left in them for upcoming parks so there would have to be some out there that would still like one, and major parks are still installing them (Eg Hurrakan Condor at PortAventura)

But Sunway Lagoon has a dry park section to it which it would fit in to: http://www.sunwaylagoon.com/attract/wild.asp As for SP selling, well it could have gone to a small park as cheap thrill ride to start off with, but ultimately Sunway has held on to it for whatever reason.

Umm, I once dreamt that I visited AT (Don't ask me how, I have never visited the place), but I woke up just before I was going to ride Nemesis, does that count?

They destroyed them?! Destructive bastards This is a quote from that recent WVTP survey. A new water-rollercoaster is being considered for a Theme Park on the Gold Coast. Riders are placed in one of two cars on the train which resembles a giant surfboard. Each car is a free-spinning circle that holds six people. The track is essentially a giant, upright U and the surfboard is loaded at the bottom of the U. The propulsion accelerates the surfboard up both sides of the track up to a height of 20 metres. A typical ride consists of approximately five to six cycles of the train travelling through the U. This ride will be a wet ride, with the surfboard/train plowing through water jets. Based on this description, how appealing is this experience to you personally? Both these pieces of information point to the ride being the 20m version. And anyway if it were 35m high it would be the highest of its type, not the smallest. Anyone know of any American waterparks that closed recently? I can only think of WnW in Vegas.

I think the only reason they ever added that WWW bonus was as a honeymoon period offer for WWW. All it really was was a means to get people in to WWW, try it out, get to like it etc. Doing so could eventually lead to people buying a WWW annual pass, or in the current situation, a platinum pass.

Sorry, what are you trying to say with respect to nev's comments? How was he making a joke? How was he having a dig at the girl? 'Plenty' is a bit of an exaggeration, the only incident i know of is on Superman: Ride of Steel, you can read about it here: http://capital2.capital.edu/admin-staff/dalthoff/sros.html The difference is on roller coasters the brakes need to be able to open and close (eg the rollback brakes on SE) They used to also do it on the final brakes so the friction wheels would have to do less work to get trains out of the brakes when it was time to move the train (didnt have to put up with magnetic resistance) Now they have abandoned that approach and just have fixed brake fins mounted on a sloping section of track, and then a friction wheel at the bottom to physically stop the train.

That's actually good thinking there WnW_Rocks, I can imagine having 2 mirror image bikes so there would be 4 people in each row. The trains would probably be a bit heavy, but it could give a different experience depending on where you sit; straddling a motorbike in the middle in a belly down position, or sitting in a sidecar hanging off the side. I might have made us go a bit off topic though, I was just considering the possibilities. http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/article.php?aid=140

Djsupersleuth is correct in saying that a heavier gondola has the potential to hit the buffers harder. Basically you can link the equation E = vBl to F = BIL to show that the resistive forces on a conductor being passed through a magnetic field are directly proportional to its velocity (Im not going to show how I derived this since it is long and boring) F ∞ kv So what does this mean for Space Probe, or any other drop ride for that matter? Basically, the faster a gondola comes into the brakes, the more force that will act to stop them. Now, we should all know that gondolas will always hit the brakes at the same speed, no matter what the loading since all objects (when negating air resistance) accelerate towards the earth at the same rate. Since braking force is linked to velocity, and velocity only, that means the same braking force would be acting on the gondola. Because of this, everyone gets the same amount of force given them for braking, but unfortunatley for our aforementioned Maori friends they have a bit more weight force acting against the upward force from the brakes, so they wouldn't decelerate as quickly hence hitting the buffers harder. (since ∑F=ma , the upward net force would be lower, so deceleration would be lower)

It would appear those track segments are just for the station and brakes since you can see the mountings for friction wheels, and remember if they were launch segments they would be the "box" type track with a smaller track in the middle for the catch car to travel along. And the black things would have to be supports, the reason they are so small is again because they would just be for in the station and on the brakes, which have no major dynamic forces on them and are low to the ground. Were the track segments over near WWW any more interesting? like turns and so forth. As for the colour scheme, in a way it matches the GD. Though I think we can kiss goodbye any sort of integration with the bushland in this part of DW....Rivertown is dead. As for what myk has said about the layout, I guess this is what I was expecting considering its more family oriented, it sounds like a similar idea to what they have done with Furius Baco, it's all high speed turns close to the ground. It also makes more sense because its motorbike themed. Now, just a little idea that popped into my head, it has been mentioned that the motorbikes will feature a sidecar. Is it possible that the sidecar could dangle off the side of the track in a similar manner to the seats on Furius Baco?

Well, while Walt built the place for families, he also built it to make money, having a couple of thrill rides in there with higher height limits probably made more business sense for them. But the sorts of thrill rides Disney has don't actually have height limits that are that bad, you still see 5 year olds on them so there aren't that many guests that are being excluded.

Something funny that I noticed: Umm, correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't a few people be dead if they had "hit the ground", that part of the account sounds a bit made up, I'd probably wait for a more reliable account, its seems like the people they spoke to are those "I seen the tornado destroy ma trailer" types.

No because it's for online purchases only.

Its OK Richo, we did get what you said. If they had decided to close the ride for PR reasons then we perhaps might have only seen one line in a story (Might have been something like "As a result of the accident, several parks worldwide have closed similar rides, including a local ride, the Giant Drop at Dreamworld") Instead DW have had to grapple with media attention and dedicated stories about them from the Courier mail and MSN as a result of their decision, which they could have avoided. I think people were just talking about other aspects of the situation, related to the decisions of the American operators.

IMO, it would be more logical to close equipment that is known to use cables made by the manufacturer of the ones in use on Superman Tower of Power.

But at the end of the day people don't have to ride GD if they feel uncomfortable. Closing it is just imposing paranoia on everyone.

Just a heads up, a couple more galleries are now up for the southern star, including a retrospective one so you can see the whole construction process to date. http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/gallery.php?pid=23

^ Cyclone v2.00.... I vote for light blue supports. No no, wait, it isn't actually a new ride, they just decided to add a second train to cyclone finally, and that's the transfer track. Welcome aboard by the way, thanks for the pics, do you have any more of say the work going on around at WWW?

The odd thing about this is a couple of days ago when I was watching Mythbusters re-runs on American cable they were actually testing a myth where people can get cut in half by a whipping cable, or course they substituted a pig carcass for a person, but in the end they still couldn't get a whipping cable to do much more than leave really bad welts, let alone actually cut through something. Ill be interested to hear what actually caused it. But, i dont really see how a cable snapping is a problem related only to giant drop rides, a cable is a fairly generic component, so Intamin are correct in what they are saying about only manufacturing some parts of a ride. I guess what I am trying to say is that a cable snapping is not really Intamins fault (Compared to things Intamin has been responsible for such as their restraint failures, since that was something they actually designed) unless of course all this time Intamin had been commissioning rides with inadequate cables.

Hooray, we successfully managed to miss the construction of a new ride.

No offence Robb, but the only time we see you around these boards is when you are promoting something to do with your site. TPR is sucessful and I respect you for that, but it would be cool to have you around in normal discussions sharing your experiences etc and not just advertising, we dont bite.