Gazza

See, with this roof, is there anything stopping them from buying a ton of off the shelf video projectors, putting them in the windows of the main street buildings, and pointing them upwards, obviously ensuring they adjust the images to account for the distortion.

Booya, 5 bit colour. Just another side observation, but anyone else noticed the disproportionate number of 'lighting guys' that happen to be into theme parks.

I was always under the impression that portable rides were run from diesel generators (How could you always find a grid connection for a portable ride) and hence could still be operated.

Wii? My advice would be to just look at what games are on each console that you are interested in, and buy the one that has them. I can't see any other factors/features between them really making much of a difference, apart from the Blu-Ray player on the PS3. But yeah, games should be the deciding factor.

Well, as a 'VIP' option it's definitely preferable to some of the things other parks offer, such as queue jump passes, because in this case normal guests aren't disadvantaged. Of course, there would probably be less of a need for this if DW ran their rides more efficiently blah blah blah, but that's not gonna change is it? I personally wouldn't get one, since it is easy enough to get the major rides done early. Dunno, I doubt I would find it boring.....It's not as if I would stop halfway and start reading a book or listening to my ipod out of boredom. Walkthroughs are pretty fun, the Horror one at USH was quite good, but that one was multi level, with elaborate theming.

Why don't you just go there right at opening and ride repeatedly, then come back late afternoon and do the same thing? I think now they have sorted it pretty well in terms of operations. I have never had a day at the park and thought that two trains should have been on instead of one, I guess they have enough historic data to go by.

I have thought those exact same things too...I think an easy way to do timetables is to just show them in between the safety videos (At the moment its just a blank screen) They should play the chimes whenever they have the annoucements in the queue (about how they have "detected tremors in various parts of the city", and how you should not have loose items) It would be nice to have the turnstiles at the entrace of the ride though...they have recently put in new gates at the parks, so if they still have the old ones in the 'boneyard' why not?

Joz, thanks for the update. Some things I spotted: http://www.parkz.com.au/photo/AU/Gold_Coas...73-1_09_08.html To the left of the wooden shipping container you can see the rails that the transfer track moves along. http://www.parkz.com.au/photo/AU/Gold_Coas...74-1_09_08.html About halfway down the image, but on the far right hand side you can see an aqua coloured thing wrapped in plastic...is that part of the train? It looks suspiciously jet ski shaped. http://www.parkz.com.au/photo/AU/Gold_Coas...73-1_09_08.html Someone needs to pick up that bottle, its been there for a few days now I'm interested to see what happens with those curved segments, are they hills as you said, or heavily banked turns? Also, I don't know what sort of camera you have, but is it possible to go for a ride on the flume to get some pics further up the site from that side?

Yeah, I've done it.

That's pretty much it, though some rides don't really prohibit it, and these tend to be the rides where you take your stuff with you, or have to hold onto your stuff. Water rides seem to fall into this category, as do sedate vehicular rides (Model T's, Trains, Skyrides)

Just thought I'd quickly clear something up, not that is really important or anything, but the track is the same as motocoaster, not the same as Superman, Atlantis Adventure, or any large scale Intamin or anything....Look at the cross ties, they are round rather than square section. Fail

Excellent point, you'd hope they would be thinking carefully about what they are choosing to give space to these days, as there literally isn't room for anything that is a filler. I'm interested to know what the real budget is for this...We've heard heard $10 Mil, but I'm thinking back to when Superman was supposedly being built for $12 Mil, which grew to $16 Mil by opening day....An this thing is rumoured to have caves and rocks etc to be weaving through. The main gist of what I am saying pertains to the other bits of MDMC track you could see, notice how drawn out the transitions are, Jet Rescue on the other hand seems to be doing a full twist to nearly 90 degrees in the space of just one segment, in a similar style to much lauded rides like Maverick. Compare with the final product of MDMC and you can see just how long it takes to twist between the turns. Also Joz, just wondering, did you see any track that looks like it would be part of a hill rather than a steeply banked curve? .

Some other funny thing that happened.....When I was at MW we were going into the Batman ride, the host let us file in, but waited at the door. But instead of everyone going into the middle of the room, they all started going in behind the railing that runs around the outside of the room (I guess its there to keep people away from the book cases), and started queuing there. I think the first words out of my mouth were "You're doing it wrong" (Go internet meme's) and I had to convince my sister to come out from behind there. Needless to say It was pretty funny being the only person standing in the middle of the room. When the host came back in after shutting the door people soon sorted themselves out.

Just noticed something, but do subscriptions still exist or not? A topic has obviously come up in that forum about this, but I thought that aspect of the site had sort of been abandoned.....nobody has their green usernames anymore or anything, and I'm still unsure as to what the go is with that DVD.

I went on here when there were only a couple of shots, didn't realise you were still in the process. Anyway, for a bit of a laugh, why not check out how the motocoaster track pieces looked from a similar angle: http://www.parkz.com.au/photo/AU/Gold_Coas...otocoaster.html

I get the feeling there might be a bit of banking there. But seriously, that's awesome.

It seems pretty varied in terms of what sort of rafts parks use....The survey I posted about a little while back said the choice of 1, 2, or 3 person rafts. Check out the images at the bottom of this page and you can see the options parks use.

Probably more a case of stretching the truth a bit, since the idea of a coaster with water jets firing at it has been around since at least 2000.

You are right about the track brakes http://www.rcdb.com/ig649.htm?picture=7 This is all just speculation, but it seems that with most powered coasters the lowest point of the ride is pretty much at ground level anyway, so if it somehow was in the wrong bit of the course when the power was cut it would probably just valley...not that it would be that much of an issue since it could just be driven out when the power is switched back on.

^Yup. Coasters don't have brakes in the car, there are only brakes mounted on the track. In the event of an E stop on a coaster each set of brakes closes immediatley, and generally cant be opened again until key is used to get the ride out of lockdown. Because all the brakes are closed, any cars/trains on the track will just keep going until they get to the next set of brakes, and will be brought to a stop. The brakes are always placed so that when the brakes are released a car/train will be able to make it to the end of the ride under its own energy; look in the background of this pic, and you can see the way the mid course brakes are at the top of a hill. Having brakes inside the cars/trains wouldn't work, if the E stop was pressed when the car/train stopped at the bottom of a hill there would be no way to get it going again without towing it to the end of the ride with a winch or a crane...Or what if the car was stopped in an inversion...clearly no good.

Kamikaze...Darn. While you never really expect water slides to have good or original names anyway, Manta would have been a nice departure from the norm.

Well, a month and bit back they were repainting the old wild west area...I'm sure they would have schedule to do these things on every few years.

Id imagine it would come back down to ground level, as there would be little point having people hanging up in the air in the event of an emergency.

Haha this feature is cool..When I first saw this article I too thought it was funny that there were about 4 different parks tagged, but WWW was the park pictured...though I'm guessing the reason is because the park is going to have an "Uphill water coaster" and a "Tornado"....Though what happened to the water coaster/rocket in the final plans?

But at the bottom right of the map you can see a bunch of circular things, and a blue line in a figure 8, its almost as if they are planning on shifting a bunch of the rides down there.