2016? Who Cares! It's All About 2017 to 2030!

CP Nostalgia: Hell, I don't remember last Tuesday. That said: what you remember from 12 years ago isn't a fact. It's an opinion. Does B&M profit by millions of dollars on each ride built? Maybe. Maybe not. But I expect they're going to make more money off of building coasters then not building coasters, and so why would they agree to not build coasters and make less money?

Captain Hawkeye :Or maybe there just wasn't a lot of demand for dive coasters in the US.

In which case the non-compete would have cost B & M nothing--they wouldn't have sold any (or many) anyway

Because they didn't just agree to not do the work. They were paid to not do the work. Obviously this needed to make financial sense before they would have agreed to it. It wasn't just a blank demand, Busch paid a premium for that contract. So maybe the "made" more money by not doing the work, as they could spend that time making money on other models. This isn't a huge multi-national corporation we are talking about here.

Well, we are talking about a company that builds rides in countries around the world, for which it charges tens of millions of dollars for each installation. B&M is not a "mom and pop" operation and is, indeed, a multi-national company (in terms of where rides are installed) .

I'm sorry, it's just hard for me to buy into the notion that B&M would have accepted less money for not building a certain type of coaster than it could have made by building such coasters.

Unless they couldn't have built such coasters because:

1) they were full up with other orders

2) no one other than Busch wanted to buy Dive Machines in 2004.

BTW, B & M would not have accepted less money for the Busch coasters. If anything, they would probably have charged more for them.

And they were apparently still free to sell them outside the US

Do you believe B&M profited $13.5M for SheiKra? Because I would be shocked if they earned more than 1% for the design work. You seem to be confusing profit with cost. If they are paid money equivalent to the profit earned on a design, to not do work, they can make more money from designing other rides during that time as well.

Edit: let me try another example.

You design dining room tables. You have 4 different designs: round, square, rectangle, oval. You charge $1000 per table, $100 of which is profit. You are contracted to build an oval table for the Smith family, but they don't want the Jones family to have one yet. You pay an extra $200 for the exclusive rights to your oval table for a year. You can still make money on other, more popular designs. Now you can profit more because you were paid extra money for not doing the work, while still being able to profit from 3 popular designs.

Considering that 2 of the 3 dive coasters built between 2012-2014 were in China (where steel is relatively cheap), I wonder if steel costs explain the lack of dive coasters being planned around 2008 (which would put their opening around 2010-2013), considering how much steel is needed for the track and supports, relative to other coaster types. The cost of steel was way, way up in 2007-08.

That would explain the industry downturn in general, not just one type of ride.

When that type of ride uses significantly more steel than any other design, why wouldn't it?

More steel per length of track. A 5000ft long hyper uses more steel than a 2500ft long dive.

B&M does more than the design work, don't they also supply all of the parts? The plant in Ohio does work for B&M right? They don't work for the customer who just gives them track plans from B&M, correct? Also the trains, brakes, lift parts, etc. are all supplied by B&M, correct? I would expect that those parts are marked up over the cost of manufacturing so B&M makes a profit from those.

I was under the impression that parks contract the construction crew but they give B&M a sum of money to supply the design and engineering, all parts and technicians to start up and commission the ride. There is more money to be made by B&M than just being paid for the design.

CP Maverick said:

More steel per length of track. A 5000ft long hyper uses more steel than a 2500ft long dive.

That's an absurd comparison, given that there are so few coasters with track length in excess of even 4000 ft (none of which were built after 2003, before steel prices shot up, by the way). The fact of the matter is if you have a cap ex budget of $20 million, that money gets you a lot more bang for your buck with a hyper/giga than it does with the dive coaster, in terms of material costs.

CP Maverick said:

You design dining room tables. You have 4 different designs: round, square, rectangle, oval. You charge $1000 per table, $100 of which is profit. You are contracted to build an oval table for the Smith family, but they don't want the Jones family to have one yet. You pay an extra $200 for the exclusive rights to your oval table for a year.

Yes, but...

If I can make $300 profit by making a table for the Jones and no table for the Smiths, or I can make $1,000 profit building oval tables for the Jones, the Smiths, the Channings, the Mermans, the Sondheims, the Vander Gelders, the Kirks, the McCoys, the Spocks and the Sulus, why would I choose the former?

noggin said:

If I can make $300 profit by making a table for the Jones and no table for the Smiths...

*Pricks up ears*

djDaemon said:

Considering that 2 of the 3 dive coasters built between 2012-2014 were in China (where steel is relatively cheap), I wonder if steel costs explain the lack of dive coasters being planned around 2008

To my knowledge all B&M track is manufactured in Ohio and then shipped over seas. There have been plenty of photos of track pieces with shipping labels to parks in Europe and China.

Ensign Smith said:

noggin said:

If I can make $300 profit by making a table for the Jones and no table for the Smiths...

*Pricks up ears*

I get jokes :-)

Wisco Woody said:
The park I visit most is Six Flags Great America, and the longest line at the park is consistently Superman: Ultimate Flight due to low actual capacity and 3 minutes + between dispatches. The actual capacity for SUF clones and Tatsu on slow days is between 600 and 800 riders per hour.

From what you, and a few others are saying, I have concluded that you see flyers as poor coasters with low capacity, but I would like to *kindly* prove you wrong.

First off, Six Flags is Six Flags. They clone from one park to the next, and run with a very different style than Cedar Fair parks. Six Flags tend to have slower dispactches, and the ride ops are not as good as Cedar Fair ride ops (generally speaking).

Superman: Ultimate Flight is cloned at multiple Six Flags parks. The ride has slow dispatches, and a terrible capacity because Six Flags just wants to add a new coaster, not a good coaster. They seem to think that adding a coaster will satisfy people for 3-4 years and then they will add another one, and repeat the process. Six Flags decided to go cheap and buy B&M flyers with only one station instead of two. With that, as well as bad operations, it results in a bad capacity. This is in NO way B&M's fault, or the design of the ride, but merely Six Flags being cheap.

Before you say the Tatsu has two stations, yet a bad capacity, let me point out that Tatsu isn't a clone, has the dual station and actually has double the REAL capacity of the SUF rides, just because of the single vs. Dual station. The SUF clones have a capacity of averaging 800RPH and Tatsu has 1600RPH, even with their slow operations.

Now let's look at Cedar Fair. If say, Cedar Point were to add a B&M flying coaster, they would 'go the extra mile' and get a dual station. Cedar Point goes beyond with their rides, unlike Six Flags.

And as exit English points out...

e x i t english said:

Theoretical capacity is based upon having perfect dispatch intervals, full trains, no stacking each and every time. They take the number of riders per train and multiply by the amount of dispatches a ride can have in 1 hour (calculated by ride time/midcourse, etc..)

Actual capacity is based upon the speed of the crew, the amount of time it takes the train to load, assuming the ride is always running all available trains, etc..

Cedar Point and Disney have always reigned supreme in the "cranking out trains" department, but some rides aren't as easy to actually run like that.

Cedar Point is very good at cranking out trains! And, like I have mentioned, flyers with a dual station, plus a Cedar Point crew results in a very high capacity ride!

A Dual Station on a B&M Flyer means 1 train on the lift hill, one on the course, and 2 in the station.

To simplify, CP fast dispatches + 4 trains/dual station = Crazy High Capacity!

Nope. Your wrong. Go to KI and ride firehawk. Then go and ride Banshee or Diamondback. There is no such thing as crazy high capacity on a flyer. Cedar Point isn't any more capable than any other park on the planet. They hire and contract work from the same pool as everyone else. Never happen. I'm talking crazy high capacity. Not that Cedar Point will or won't get a flyer. But I will never wait in the line. KI has had the waittimes posted on interactive maps around the park for 2 years now. And Firehawk is always the longest wait.

Maybe it would be a good thing if CP built one though. As that would draw more people into the never ending que that is a flyer. And draw people out of the rest of the lines. Where I would be.

If cedar point can get the crappy capacity people slow consumer in Valravn, then they can absolutely get a flying coaster. Also, Manta at Sea World was only running one side of the stations when I went, but they were easily hitting 1,200 PPH, even without the second load station being used.

1,200pph would be a full 8 car train with no empty seats dispatched every 1:36. Somehow I don't see that happening; especially combining a Flyer with SeaWorld ops and one station running.