Cedar Point's 2011 ride will target thrill seekers

The Tivoli version, at a mere 80 meters, has a capacity of 960 pph. The Vienna version is about 46% taller, and I've seen maximum vertical speeds of up to 3 m/s. So, if the Vienna version travels up (and down) an extra 37 meters (for a total of 74 meters), it would take an extra 20-25 seconds for the ride cycle, give or take.

At 960 pph, the ride cycle would be (at 24 passengers each) 1.5 minutes. Adding 20 seconds gives us about 1.83 minutes for a ride cycle. With the same 24 passenger carriage, you'd get about 785 pph at 117 meters, give or take.

Of course, increasing the capacity of the carriage would help substantially, especially if they could add 12 passengers. That would result in a capacity of almost 1,200 pph.

DJ - you ignore load/unload times.

These can be ignored with passenger rides (like coasters and StR) but not on single carriage rides like a swing.

Ahh, true. For the 36-passenger carriage, it would take 50% longer to load.

Or is that not what you're getting at?

Yeah. Sure the ride has a 1:30 ride time, but that is time that the carriage is in motion and doesn't include the time where it is parked and riders reload.

And if Mantis has taught us anything, its that riders are idiots and you can assume a worst case scenario for how long this will actually take.

Anything short of 1:30 to 2 minutes for parked time is grossly overestimating the competancy of the riders. Both to exit in a timely manner and to stow their stuff, sit down, and have their restraints checked and rechecked.

It would be interesting to time some of the other single carriage rides (WT, maXair, Skyhawk, Waveswinger) to see actually how long it takes from the time it parks to the time it launches again. That'd give a much more accurrate time than my guesstimate, but I doubt I'm too far off.

Or just time the overall cycle...from the time it lauches to the time it launches again.

That doesn't really help though as each has different ride times.

If you want to know how long it takes to get batch 1 of idiots off the ride and batch 2 seated and restrained, it is easiest to time it from park to launch.

It wouldn't surprise me if drop tower with 40 people, takes very little more time to "check" than one of the 12 person shafts of power tower.

It's not like person 1 sits down, then person 2 goes, they all come in the gate and scramble around together. I would time MaXairs "scramble" time and compare it to the 12 person carriages on power tower, probably not too much different.

I'm not saying it would be much different. But its not a negligible amount of time either. I would bet most of those rides spend 1.5-2 minutes on the ground in between cycles.

And that can severly affect pph.

Well, I was going off Funtime's capacity numbers, assuming they'd built-in the appropriate load/unload times.

Given that an 80 meter ride (where the actual ride time would be around 53 seconds) takes 90 seconds, they're assuming riders will unload and load in 37 seconds. You're right - that would never happen IRL. Especially *check* at Cedar *check* Point.

*check* ;)

That would be sweet. But, I won't hold my breath.

This ride looks crazy.

The footprint for a two tower installation could be reduced by running the towers in tandem. That is, while one tower is running, the other is loading/unloading. This type of operation would reduce the distance required between the towers to the radius of the swing's circle plus whatever nominal safety gap is required. Such that, if the swing circumscribes an 80' circle at maximum velocity, the towers would only need to be 40' + s apart from each other.

This system would require additionally that swings either not revolve or revolve at a much lower speed to reduce the 'spread', until clearing the arms of the opposing tower, and then again on the way down.

The pph for this system would be simple, 2 x the unload/load time (assuming this segment of the cycle is longer than the running time).

That doesn't really look like Cedar Point's style..

Well, knowing cedar point, there will be seat belts, over the shoulder harnesses, 5 point buckles and more holding you in. So that would increse the load/ unload times.

I realize you're halfway joking crazy, but on that same point, I could have sworn I saw an "etreme rides" type show a few months back that showed a star flyer. The seat and lab "bar" was the exact same as the ones on wave swinger. It looked really freaky!

It is the same. But it's cedar point we are talking about.

If Cedar Point built one of these star flyers, couldn't they make seats going 4 across instead of 2 across? I could totally see Cedar Point adding the little childrens seat belts that need to be unlocked with the metal thing.

I'm calling it now..........its gonna be something like star flyers because they did have something like that many many years ago in the water......ill try and find a pic

You can see a picture and see video of the old sea swing at the 2:15 mark of this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBnsLbjQOvs

And Here's a photo of it.