Richard

The portions of this thread relating to Wonderland Sydney's Snowy River Rampage have been moved here. As explained in the since-moved posts, most of the trough does dry up when the pumps are turned off. This is evident if you've ever witnessed an e-stop or blackout on one of these rides - the water drains very quickly to the bottom of the ride.

Take Note: The Community Guidelines have been amended. Some points have been cleared up to make them less ambiguous and two now points have been added. Spamming is not tolerated. In the context of Roller-Coaster.com.au Forums, this is defined as posting short replies to a thread that have little content or add nothing meaningful to the topic. This applies to all forums, including Chit-Chat. Users are limited to a single account at all times. If you would like to change your username contact a staff member. Users found operating more than one account will be subject to deletion of accounts and/or banning, depending on the severity of the situation i.e. if the user has created a second account with malicious intents. With the second one, I urge those users who are currently actively using a second account to stop. I know who it is, and as of next week I will be banning those offending - both accounts.

It's all slowly coming together. I myself can only really focus on three parks - Sea World, Movie World and Dreamworld - and the amount of content for each of these reflects that fact. If anyone has high-quality photographs from other parks around Australia, don't hesitate to send them my way. See the Contribute page for more information. I can't be everywhere, and most of the gaps in the gallery are simply because I haven't been to a particular park, or not in a long time.

Construction continues, with focus shifted more to the theming side of things now that the ride's structure is completed. Today's construction update can be seen here: http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/gallery.php?gid=110

That doesn't have much to do with this topic though. Start a new thread and maybe you'll get some answers.

Not sure of the maths behind that, but I'd like to think that even Dreamworld will be able to complete more than one cycle an hour on The Claw. It's obvious that Dreamworld has a working relationship with Intamin. I don't see what's so groundbreaking about that. Their products are among the best in the world and everything Dreamworld have purchased from them has been a winner in one way or another.

No surprises there, Slick. Especially seeing as Ian's last construction update clearly showed jungle theming. Today's construction update can be seen here. Not a whole lot going on. Testing's not yet started and they're not yet into "last minute rush" mode on the site so it's still going a bit slow.

I'd say that if you were going to build something on the island or in the river, you'd drain it. You'd have to in order to put footers in anyway.

There's always 2006's Police Academy 8 (if it's taken them 10 years to get the script right since the last one, it's bound to be good ). Actually, if anything, I think this guarantees that the stunt show will be around for a good four or five more years before they even think about touching it. It's a great show (honestly the best theme park show I've seen, beating out every Disney or Universal show I've sat through), but I've thought for a long time now it's needed to take some lengthy time off and have the set virtually rebuilt from the ground up. I think they've reached the limits with what they can repair with "on the fly" maintenance. That's beside the point of this topic though.

Next update will be here tomorrow.

I've gotten the Islands of Adventure gallery up. At 100 photographs it's the biggest gallery on Total Thrills and I believe the biggest I've ever made. See it here. The rest of the Orlando galleries will be coming as I find time to put them together. There's easily another few hundred photographs to come out of Orlando parks alone.

I'd be more worried about the capacity of one of them than anything else. If they can get more than about 350pph tops then I'd be surprised. I'm doubtful that space would have been the reason they opted for the Gyro Swing. You'd really have to be trying your hardest not to fit a Half Pipe into the land they used for this. Seems more likely that they just looked at it and realised a Gyro Swing is probably a better ride. Dreamworld made the right choice. Of course I'm still of the opinion that they should perhaps have gone with the large Gyro Swing.

No one here has been "paying out" The Claw. Furthermore, please discuss that in the appropriate thread. Let's try and keep threads to the topic at hand. If you want any sort of meaningful discussion about The Claw and what it might have been, I'd suggest posting in this thread, or creating a new one.

I think you guys are taking for granted something that is pretty shakey at this stage. By all means speculate and post what you'd like to see etc., but I wouldn't get too excited about anything just yet.

I don't think that there's much untruth or stretching of the truth with Americans complaining about roughness or headbanging. Certainly with steel coasters, they're generally right when they say something is rough (I did think Revolution was smoother than most say), though they tend to be a bit soft on wooden coasters. The Zamperla Volare really doesn't look fun. One person at CoasterBuzz said it's the first coaster they've ridden with "throat bashing", which by looking at the design of the trains, doesn't seem too far off. To put it simply, rent is the profit that Dreamworld as its own entity makes. Think of it as being 33% more profitable.

But apparently B&M were very against the idea of the launch on Hulk. Universal had slipped into the contract that they had to build the track with mounts for the motors and B&M weren't too happy when they were forced to do this more or less against their own interests. From what I was told at Westcoaster, they also refused to work with Disney because they wanted a launched coaster. I'm really not seeing much evidence that this park will actually be a theme park. Everything I've read about it points to it being more of a resort with a golf course and shopping districts etc., and nothing much left over that points to an actual theme park. Australia's unique in that a tourist attraction of any nature can be referred to as a theme park.

They're original on Cyclone. Scenic Railway is as wooden as it's always been. There may be the odd steel reinforcement here and there, but I'm not seeing the link between a recent redevelopment and steel.

The Coney Island Cyclone, probably the most famous wooden coaster in the world, is also a wood-on-steel build. There are dozens of coasters like this around the world, and became particularly popular when CCI were still around. It's far more maintenance friendly and is good when there are obstacles below.

Attendance is up a whopping 13% and rent is up 33% for the twelve months ending July. It's also been six years since the last major thrill ride (in terms of capital expenditure). The rest pretty well writes itself.

Funny, I'd like to see them go the absolute other direction from what most of you want. I don't want to see Dreamworld attempt to pull off immersive theming, Disney style. I certainly don't want to see Dreamworld try and reinvent itself as a Magic Kingdom style park, simply because Dreamworld really don't have the financial, technical or creative resources. Really, a step should be taken back by Dreamworld. They should stop trying to theme rides, and go for just making them look good - from off and on the ride. Spend the money you'd otherwise spend on theming and go out and hire an architect to design a nice building for a change. Fully landscape the surroundings, plant trees around the queue that provide natural shade. Nick Central was a step in the right direction. The theming took a step back (though the Nickelodeon "feel" is definitely there), and instead there is a really nice looking area. I can't say Tower of Terror, Giant Drop or Cyclone's queues are much fun to be in with most things broken or in a state of disrepair. Disney are the masters of theming. Their lands and attractions can tell a story without actually telling it. It's not force-fed theming like Dreamworld tries to do. I think Dreamworld would look and feel much nicer if they stopped trying to make things meaningful and justify fun thrill rides, and just took that step back; build the rides and just make them look nice. People don't go to Dreamworld for intricately themed rides and attractions - Movie World's the park for that - so why do they keep trying to do it this way?

http://www.roller-coaster.com.au/gallery.php?gid=104 The ride will reopen next weekend (August 22), fully repaired from the fire last year.

Drive to Canberra from Brisbane and it's about where you'll spend the night driving at reasonable speeds. That is to say, more or less in the middle of nowhere. Build it and they'll come, they say. Of course, if it's no good, they won't come back and that's the end of it.

scott, you're seemingly fairly new to theme parks. Did you ever ride Thunderbolt, out of curiousity? Tony Braxton-Smith, Dreamworld's former CEO said to me once a few years ago (when they first started investigating what to do with Thunderbolt) something along the lines of, "We know Thunderbolt is a rough ride. It always has been." Signs in the ride's queue and in the station said "Some riders may consider this a rough ride." - something I've never seen at any other park. In 1995 a hefty sum was spent upgrading the trains in a drastic attempt to improve smoothness of the ride. willsy - what you've said is wrong. I just don't see the purpose of living in the past, "worshipping" a ride that really wasn't very good. I didn't say, "I don't like it, so nothing should be done," or anything to that nature. I asked how Dreamworld or its guests would at all benefit from this. At least if you're going to respond to me, and quote what I said verbatim (which is totally unnecessary when it's the post above), make your point relevant to something I said. Suddenly to have an interest in theme parks, you must like everything you see? Yes, I focus on the bad points a lot. Why? It's a heck of a lot more interesting than threads like "Why I love Dreamworld", or "Why Thunderbolt Rocked" or that sort of crap.

I can't believe anyone would want anything as a tribute of Thunderbolt. It was an amusement ride, and a very very poor one at that. Really, how would Dreamworld, or its guests for that matter, benefit from some hideously tacky monument to a ride everyone wanted to see destroyed? What would it achieve?

A problem that's been hanging around since the beginning has been resolved; I've fixed the problem with slashes. Long story short, Javascript makes use of apostrophes to enclose certain parameters. If you want these parameters to include an apostrophe (as with contractions or possessives), you have to put a slash before the apostrophe, otherwise it'll basically cut the parameter short where you put one. What I was originally doing was putting slashes straight into the database, which meant when the thumbnail titles were shown (when you hold the mouse over a thumbnail), they included the slashes. A single line of code which acts as a "find and replace" fixes that problem. Six Flags Over Texas gallery is now up, as is one from Universal Studios Florida. I said this a few weeks ago, but I'm hoping to get the Florida ones up pretty soon. As always stay tuned!