Another coaster post: Untamed's twin, and Schwarzkopf's terrifying loopers

[mmcirvin]

Ride videos of Falcon at Duinrell in the Netherlands. This little Gerstlauer coaster is probably the closest existing equivalent to Canobie Lake's new ride, Untamed, which opens in a couple of weeks. (Rage at Southend also has the identical layout, but its garish yellow and purple appearance is very different; Untamed's rustic theming is very similar to Falcon but with grizzly bears instead of froggies.)

It's really short—as the comments on the videos often say, maybe twenty seconds of actual coaster ride from the top of the vertical lift. But those twenty seconds involve a beyond-vertical drop, a loop, an Immelmann and a zero-g roll in immediate succession (then around in a circle and back to the station). I think the idea is to pack as much disorientation as possible into a tiny space.



I've also been admiring this site about Anton Schwarzkopf's classic steel coasters. derspatchel had told me that this company (and its engineer Werner Stengel) had made Magic Mountain's Revolution and Hersheypark's SooperDooperLooper, two of the first modern coasters to have a vertical loop (Arrow's simple corkscrew coasters had just barely beaten them to inversion, but these loops were relatively huge). What I had not known was that they went on to specialize in vertical loops to the point of sheer unbelievability. Some of those huge loops on the Thriller (now operating as the Tsunami at Islas San Marcos in Aguascalientes, Mexico) look nearly circular; they must be taxing to ride. The really amazing thing about these gigantic multi-loopers is that they're made to be portable and tour around on the funfair circuit.

Probably the most infamous one is West Edmonton Mall's Mindbender, the site of a horrific fatal 1986 accident apparently caused by a combination of design issues, lax maintenance and improper inspection procedures (it was impossible to tell whether the wheel bogies were about to fall off without removing the cars from the track, but the manual telling people to do this had never been translated into English in the chaos following Schwarzkopf's bankruptcy). Amazingly, it's still operating with redesigned cars.

What puts the scale of these 1980s machines into perspective for me is that the Mindbender, which was based on a portable design and is operating inside a shopping mall (granted, a mind-bogglingly huge one), is in every relevant dimension larger than Busch Gardens' Loch Ness Monster, which in my old brain is the paradigmatic big roller coaster.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's a night ride on Olympia Looping (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBCnGZRXslE&feature=fvsr), and here's Thriller while it was operating under the name of Taz's Texas Tornado at Six Flags Astroworld (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMizevbvnW0&feature=related) (the POV part starts at 2:03). Those first, twisting drops strike me as unbelievably scary.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

The Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(roller_coaster)) at Six Flags Magic Mountain was made by your guys, and the first vertical loop in a modern roller coaster, or so says Wikipedia - I was pretty sure it was the first loop in a roller coaster.

The loop is a circle, not an ellipse or oval at all. It was the first looping roller coaster I ever went on and I still like it the best. Those really tight loops where the vertical axis is twice the horizontal tend to really snap your neck at the apex; I don't care for it. I like a circular loop because you just sit there and watch the whole world smoothly invert itself around you.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Look at the bottom of the loop, not the top. The top's a circular arc but there's a lot of ease-in/ease-out where the train is going fastest. That's the clothoid loop. If it were perfectly circular all the way to the bottom, you'd experience a tremendous neck-snapping acceleration coming into and out of the loop.

On the biggest loops of the Thriller/Taz's Texas Tornado/Tsunami, they really pushed it as far as making the bottom of the arc nearly circular. I suspect this was intentional, to make the experience of riding the loop particularly intense. It's mitigated somewhat by the fact that the whole loop is pretty huge.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Here's the interesting thing, though (which I again learned from Spatch): The clothoid shape is usually attributed to Schwarzkopf and Stengel, but the photos of the 1901 Loop-the-Loop at Coney Island (http://www.ultimaterollercoaster.com/coasters/history/early_1900/coney4.shtml), probably the most famous looping coaster prior to their 1970s rebirth, show it using something like a modern clothoid. It's hard to tell the precise curvature in that picture because of foreshortening, but it's clearly varying from bottom to top.

Other early attempts at looping coasters (which go back to the mid-19th century at least) generally had smallish circular or close-to-circular loops and were murder to ride.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Well, I stand corrected. I may observe, however, that compared to other looping roller coasters the Revolution's clothoid is very gentle - not very much off circular - and it slows down quite a bit at the top, to the point that you feel you might stop and hang there. You can look side to side at that moment for one of the most delightful and gently disorienting views in all coasterdom.

As I get older, even walking in a tight circle triggers mild positional vertigo - BPPV, neurologists call it - so I fear that I will never be able to enjoy a proper roller coaster ride again. The last time I was on a coaster I was nauseated for 8 hours after.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My father's always been very susceptible to vertigo, and avoids these rides entirely. It seems to run in his side of the family. Personally, I dislike a lot of whirling or free-falling amusement-park rides that are conventionally considered tamer than coasters, but coasters themselves somehow don't affect me as badly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've never actually ridden a Schwarzkopf coaster; as I said in the other thread, by a combination of coincidence, my relative inexperience, and their once-dominant position in the industry, all five of the steel coasters I've ridden were Ron Toomer Arrow designs.

But we've discussed the possibility of stopping by Hersheypark on our vacation this summer, and I've heard that the SooperDooperLooper (or, as it was called the last time I saw but did not ride it, the sooperdooperLooper) is considered tame these days and usually has no waiting. In design, it's best described as a shorter version of the Revolution, with an identical loop.