Richard

For what it's worth we were calling Motocoaster for what it was well before it opened too. No doubts in my mind where this new ride will sit in Australia and where it deserves to sit on the world scale. No one could ever claim that I've ever gone easy on our parks or lowered the bar because it's Australia. I'd take this hyper over everything on that list @Santa07, with the possible exception of the RMCs. @rac2703 simple... because magic and now, not magic and whenever-you-get-around-to-it. Yeah, this was an unashamed puff piece. The working title was "putting the hype in hypercoaster". If VRTP can't or won't do a hype/teaser campaign then we might as well fill that void. But I'm pretty confident that the tone of this article will be vindicated once reviews start rolling in for this thing...

It's laughable how Deborah Thomas was able to throw the Disneyland buzzword out there and distract people while saying exactly what yesterday's ASX release said. It is a transparently obvious attempt at damage control. I can't work out if this company is naive enough to genuinely think that shops and apartments to cash in on the Westfield development will benefit Dreamworld. I want to say that this zoning review is motivated by pure dollars and cents, but this company's strategic blunders in recent years makes me think they might actually believe themselves when they say Disneyland.

You seem to be focusing on the banking transitions in and out of elements, which really have nothing to do with the greying/blacking out that people here are speaking of. Jet Rescue is a (surprisingly) wild ride that throws you around smoothly from side to side, but these are not sustained positive g-forces. The concept of so-called heartline design you refer to is about smoothing the ride experience rather than reducing the forces. I believe the point @Gazza was making with Jet Rescue is that these rapid-fire turns and direction changes don't typically result in heavy sustained positive g-forces for the pure fact that they're manageable forces in short bursts. Those momentary let-ups in positive g-forces would help hugely with blood flow for those prone to greying out. Jet Rescue -- and even Motocoaster -- are nothing but banked turns and they're fine. I see no reason for anyone to be scared about the forces on this one based on photos of a few twists and turns.

I'm not exactly sure where you're coming from @Fultre? I can't recall anyone putting down the video in question nor its author. It's a great video and I believe everyone has stated that. It's also only loosely based on fact so should be treated as such. The point that the video is wrong has never been directed at the author who is working with every piece of information available to him. It's to statements like "[it] has been practically spot on" which are simply incorrect and are worthy of correction in a black-and-white, fact-based approach. We've deleted a couple of posts in the last day or two that contained/quoted inappropriate personal attacks. As far as I can tell none remains in this current debate but perhaps we have different standards for what constitutes bullying? Not sure what posts you're referring to that have been swept under the rug... and whether your overall point is that we're censoring posts... or that we're not censoring enough posts?

Join the club! (or... join the crew )

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.