Richard

That's the best I've heard yet! The area is swampy flat land, high salinity (good luck growing anything but mangroves there!) and you'll have planes flying over every five minutes! This alleged park is meant to be bush/outback/crocodile themed right? So this dead flat, empty land will be planted up with eucalypts to fill it in and make it feel like the bush? Then you've got incredibly noisy planes to ruin any atmosphere the place could have. Height restrictions will limit the place from having anything but the smallest rides and attractions - I doubt that with restrictions they'd even be able to get away with 10m. There's a reason there's nothing but grass and small shrubby trees surrounding the airport. Good to see Campbell Newman's against Irwin using Brisbane's land. The guy's stinking loaded. If he wants to set up his own theme park, he should do it without trying to sway politicians with his "I'll take it overseas if you don't give me what I want!" attitude.

"FY05 Teen Market Thrill Ride" was the name assigned to the ride by Macquarie Leisure Trust Group for budgetary purposes last year.

Wouldn't an empty 220ha parcel of land that has two major highways intersecting it be included as land that has room for expansion? Sticking the business/industry sites here makes more sense than out with the urban sprawl. Save the outer land for the 9,000 jobs and whatnot. That's just fundamental town planning. I'd absolutely love for the land that ING purchased to be redeveloped as a theme park, but honestly, I couldn't ever see it happening. Have a quick browse around the ING Industrial Fund site, they state over and over that they are "sector specific", "invest in well located industrial properties throughout Australia" and so on. It would simply be outside of their mission statement, as well of outside of their basic expertise. Not to mention that the land is ideal for industry with the intersection of the two highways. I think that for sure there will be a time when there's another major theme park in Sydney, but not at the Wonderland site. The economy's not quite strong enough and tourism is at too much of a low to plonk down $300 mil just right now. Realistically in the next 10-15 years, I'd say it's pretty likely that you'll have something that makes you wonder why you ever wanted Wonderland still around. Good on you for trying though, and maybe something does come out of it.

For those of you who have, or are considering contacting various politicians etc., should read the following release: http://dipnr.nsw.gov.au/mediarel/mn20040217_2466.html The Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources have made up their mind - they've made the logical choice, the one which benefits the state as a whole. They support ING, and naturally SEPP 59. I think in nearly all cases, it's much too late to convince these politicians to jump bandwagons. Even your Opposition Party would be crazy to try and stir anything, because simply said, what's being done is in the interest of the state of NSW.

Macquarie Bank effectively owns Dreamworld and are responsible for easily the most capital expenditure ever put into that park in its history. Talk about the faceless corporation royally screwing us all. To reiterate Flea, ING have done absolutely nothing wrong. Even when they've ripped everything out and Wonderland is nothing but a pile of dirt, ING have done absolutely no wrong in aquiring the property and proceeding to develop it. Sunway are the only party in this all that any sane-minded person could hold responsible for what happened. I wouldn't even think there'd be any doubt about that, but evidently there is. Your arguments seem to be fundamentally flawed, by assuming ING is at all at fault in any of this. Also, your first quote wasn't Walt Disney, it was Albert Einstein. Please use appropriate punctuation and grammar when posting at Roller-Coaster.com.au. If you are unsure, consult the Community Guidelines, or ask myself.

"We apologise for the inconvenience. We're making improvements for your enjoyment." Rest assured, if it's anything interesting, I'll take a photo of it - I won't miss out on any important banners, notices or information they put up.

Take all the revengeance you want, I hear the Made-Up-Words Store is having a sale on it this week.

If this doesn't prompt Intamin to seriously review their lapbar design and guest weight/build guidelines. This is the fourth time one of these lapbars has ejected a rider, third time it's killed and third time it has been an overweight person. People on other sites who were at the park during the day and had ridden as little as an hour prior suggested that the operators were ensuring all seatbelts were very tight and stapling the lapbars etc., so there's not much of a chance that it was overly loose. It still baffles me that someone, overweight or not can slip out of a closed lapbar and a properly fastened seatbelt. For what it's worth, this is the same lapbar as seen on Tower of Terror at Dreamworld.

And who are you to tell us how to post and to stick to the topics etc.? This discussion about B&Ms which has emerged is far interesting than the same old "What ride do you want for XY Park?" - which you've been going a little too far with recently.

Given the amount of B&M talk there is going on, I'd go out on a limb and suggest maybe most people are leaning towards a B&M of some description for their hypothetical coaster for Movie World. I've ridden Scream!, and it definitely is bumpy. As all accounts suggest, it does vibrate almost from start to finish, and seemingly for no reason. It's not at all painful, nor even as rough as say the smoothest Arrow coasters out there, but it is noticeable and I'd say does detract from the whole B&M experience, which really is what it is because of the amazing smoothness of the rides.

http://www.westcoaster.net/community/index...?showtopic=6510 Only been on it twice in the past year?

Just to clear up the zero-g roll question, airtime's not 0Gs, by definition it is negative G-forces. A body, when launched at an angle at a given velocity will follow a certain path under the normal forces of gravity. Use the example of kicking a football to someone in your mind if so far it's not making sense. This path is called the trajectory path and can be calculated using the trajectory equation. From memory, the maximum height of said body can be found using h=sinθv²/2g, I can't remember the one for maximum length, but that's getting me sidetracked. This body, for the duration of its time in the air is subjected to 0Gs in the vertical plane. Long story short, to design a hill which produces 0Gs, you simply make it follow the path dictated by the trajectory equation, given the weight of the train, its velocity, and a whole host of other factors that would be there in real life, such as friction. An airtime hill will be a hill smaller than this 0G hill, such that the individuals on the ride would have their bodies want to follow the previously designed hill, but because of the track's shape can't, so they press up against the lapbar (or lack thereof in the case of Holiday World's SRM incident in 2003). Anyway, back to the 0G hill, what B&M did to create the zero-g roll is added a 360º twist to the track, one which revolves around the heartline of the riders (the heartline of the riders is of course changing constantly as dictated by the shape of the original 0G hill). When I said cookie-cutter, I was talking more in terms of how the rides' layouts are actually put together. Intamin loopers tend to be very square in how they're layed out, using a lot of parallel lines and straighness, whereas B&Ms really flow and use lots of curves and twists to make them more than just an expedition to see how many inversions you can knock over in the shortest amount of time and space. I've ridden probably half a dozen or so B&Ms with their similar inversion placements, and I think it works absolutely perfectly. Why mess with perfection?

There are some guidelines everyone should read and take into account when posting, if they don't want to be banned or suspended. http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/guidelines.php I won't hesitate to remove people for a period of time if they don't follow the Community Guidelines.

Well, the fact that they cited the Asian bird flu as one of the contributing reasons for the closure - something that didn't actually appear until January - yet these talks for these deals would have had to have initiated at least six months ago, if not more with how the business world operates. They've almost certainly had closing the park on the cards for at least a year - not something you decide to do overnight. I think it's pretty obvious that it was a case of looping every reason humanly possible just to shut down. There's no doubt in my mind that the park was profitable up until the final day. You'd need to be down around the 500,000 mark before you start to go into the red, and I suspect the park was doing at least 700,000 or more with ease for the past few years. The thing about 9/11, SARS, Ansett's collapse (I'd love to see how this has anything to do with anything, with Virgin offering flights at half what Ansett ever did) and most of the other reasons given, is they are, as our primary school teachers said, "excuses". These are all adversities that could easily be overcome just by taking it steady, as our Gold Coast parks proved in each of these cases. They could have just bitten the bullet and said, "OK, we're calling it quits, we want money now, not later, without spending anything of our own." Rather they figured it would make them look nicer if they blamed collectively the rest of the world - anyone but Sunway were seemingly responsible for it. As for Perth being a difficult market, I dunno. It's a choice of riding the bus all day for fun or going to Adventure World, then everyone catches the Fremantle Doctor before calling it a night... at about 4pm (to be fair though, Perth does have undeniably the best indie music scene in Australia).

Yeah, B&M certainly make the better looping coasters. I don't know, Intamin's just look too rigid and cookie-cutter. I liken them to an Arrow looper, with the advantages of perfect Swiss engineering. The zero-g roll is a funny element. Not even all B&M's get it perfect, which goes to show that this element is a very precise one for them to execute. Kraken's is by far the quintessential zero-g roll, one of the reasons that this is considered one of the best, if not the best coaster of theirs to date.

I'm not sure how my post earlier came out, but the point I was trying to make was that they will more than likely just be giving the ride an extended rehab - no changes to the ride. I was also thinking along the lines of replacing some supports, maybe even right up to rebuilding a drop or a section of channel or something if there are problems with it, but certainly nothing new added to the ride. Theming is more of an overnight job at Dreamworld - you'll see a lot of things, even the repaving of Gold Rush Country, are done without closing anything. I'd be very surprised if any retheming were done to the Log Ride during the downtime, simply because it's not necessary, and somewhat of a waste of resources (in terms of manpower), which could otherwise be put to fixing the core components of the ride.

Well, I think that's precisely the point. Every other ride at Dreamworld's only going down for a week or so each, Rocky Hollow Log Ride is down for three. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that they might be having a good go at that ride. After twenty years, as an in-house design, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to find something wrong with it that needs replacing.

Your points are becoming so irrelevant. What does people queueing for two hours to get on a ride during the summer have to do with people queuing for the same amount of time at a night event only to be turned away. The thing is, nobody should have had to demand free tickets. I couldn't name too many parks which wouldn't actually initiate by handing out return tickets, before any complaints could be made. Even Six Flags Magic Mountain, notorious for bad customer service, gave us exit passes for Scream!, simply because it had broken down some half hour before we even got there and we popped up to see what the deal was. No, it wasn't return tickets, but it was perfectly fitting given the situation, which is what return tickets are. We're not talking about giving people something equal to the amount they paid for the night or the time that they were queuing. If that were the case, they'd have someone out there with a change belt giving out $6.50 to every guest in the queue. Again, that's totally irrelevant to the purpose of return passes. We're giving these return passes, from a business perspective, not to compensate for the fact that these people missed out on riding after queuing for quite some time, but simply to change these disappointed and angry people to happy, "Hey, they're alright afterall!" people. I find it particularly amazing that now the blame has moved completely from Dreamworld - it wasn't in the least bit their fault - and is now because of the "law".

If by interesting you mean lengthy annual maintenance then yeah, riveting stuff. You won't see it operating again until May 21, as per Dreamworld's website, so expect it to probably be given some much needed love here and there, but if you're crossing your fingers for anything more, then you might end up a bit upset.

That's the great thing about Getaway, Great Outdoors and other similar shows, they'll never put down anything. They're always positive, skipping over any negatives there might be about a particular destination. It was too brief, didn't showcase anything decent at the parks and it was just painful watching them try to pass off the carnival rides and the parks as a whole as anything but very cheap and outdated.

OK, you're right, my mistake. Still, I stand by everything else I said, and I don't see you coming back with any counter-arguments for anything, aside from "You didn't read it properly". If that's the only thing you can come up with (and it's a fair point you did make) then really, your argument is a bit weak.

Back to Shark Bay, there's some articles and galleries up now here. Shark Bay opens (article) Shark Bay Gallery Shark Bay Reef Fish Guide (gallery)

You say that they could be 10-15 minutes out on their guess, but the reality is they were 90-120 minutes out on their guess for Giant Drop. You've kind of shot your theory in the foot there. Actually, it's fairly common practice in the international scene to hire people who watch over the lines. Quite simply, if there's a queue jumping problem, then it needs to be fixed. It's not ridiculous.

The FAQ is your friend when it comes to general forum usage: http://www.parkz.com.au/forums/fa...vb_poll_explain Create a new thread, with a poll included if you'd like. I'll delete this one, otherwise just discuss it here.

And the point everyone else is trying to make that if they did estimate, then they were off by about two hours. By the sounds of things, no "estimate" was made, no one was there telling people that they wouldn't get to ride if they started queueing now, no one roped off the queue line. Paying money to queue for a ride, not being told that it will be closing before you get a chance is bad customer service. The bare minimum to do in this situation is, if someone complains, give them a free return pass. You can't argue that Dreamworld was at all in the right with how they treated the guests. The proper thing to do would be to give everyone who was in the queue for any rides when the park closed a return ticket, because Dreamworld faulted by not advising of ride closing times, shutting off queues etc. Unless Cyclone had at least three operators, if not four, then there weren't enough. I won't bring up Giant Drop's needlessly long ride cycle that doubles the ride time, or the fact that the wave on Wipeout wasn't being used as it was designed, or that I doubt Cyclone ever had guests waiting at the airgates before the current cycle had returned. Don't forget that this money, maybe only $10 per returned guest, is money that the park would not get at all otherwise. It's still a win-win situation for the park, because these extra guests create no real additional overhead as it is a negligible percentage of guests in any given day, but bring in extra profits. If there's a good chance, then Dreamworld should shut the queue off, or at least put an attendant at the queue entrance advising guests that it is unlikely that they will get to ride. Great, now Dreamworld isn't responsible for queue jumping! Reality check: that's also Dreamworld's responsibility, and maybe they do need more staff to keep check on this.