coaster final height

and just for fun someone mentioned 140mph in some other thread or this thread or something so I did 140 and that gets 655 feet lol

-Doug-
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I am a Mechanical Engineering major not an english major so pardon my horrible grammer

nothing beats rollercoaster tycoon as a park game, but hyper rails is a coaster designer, solely. It has less trains than no limits, and is based on that engine, but it looks a lot lot better, and it is smoother. sometimes this causes a bit lack of sense of speed in the game, but the interface is a lot simpler to use than no limits, although it is still complicated. If you are good with NL, then stick with it.

Btw, the mass of the train is very important in this. As most here seem to know, The coefficiant of friction is a value of the force of friction over normal force, which involves mass to calculate.

Most likely more friction due to mass. As well, when on the slope to vertical, there would be a lot more force of the train on the track, causing more friction, and more reduction in speed. In free fall situations, it is irrelevant. But not when it is changing in directions.

We can roughly estimate the drag coefficient, as well al the friction loss. You see, we can safely assume that the coaster will use one of two trains, the first being MF, the second being Xcellerator (sp?). We have concrete information on the speeds these two rides can obtain, which will help us make safe gueses. I'm no physics major, but in my rough calculations, with a starting speed of 5 mph, it would take 218.55 feet to reach 92 mph. We know this isn't right, but can figure out how long it does take mf to reach top speed, versus how much is should in a vacum, and there you go, a fairly accurate guess.

ok I see about the mass I was thinking about when it was going up the launch side. I forgot about the change from going foward to going up, but if you want to do that calculation it will be very complicated, I just wanted to give a rough estimate mostly for myself since people said 400 at 120 was possible just wanted to prove it.

-Doug-
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I am a Mechanical Engineering major not an english major so pardon my horrible grammer

Has anyone out there tried roller coaster tycoon 2 yet? How does it compare with roller coaster tycool 1?

For speeds above roughly 50 mph (80kph) the friction force is equal to the drag force. Drag force increases with the square of velocity and the power required to overcome this force increases with the cube of velocity. Doubling speed from 50 mph to 100 mph will take 8x as much power to overcome. Whereas the friction load increases linearly with speed and is relatively low due to the trains small, hard wheels running on steel. The point being....if you wanted to figure out how much extra speed is needed to scale the hill, you can safely assume rolling resistance (friction losses) are zero. Some 90% of the aero drag can be attributed directly to the general dimensions and frontal area of the train...so...if you could approximate the train as a simple shape you could make a reasonable estimate (within 20%) of the extra speed your gonna need...but, frankly, I imagine the no limits simulator includes a fairly good model of this in it's simulation. This would be easier than trying to do this by hand.

my calculations are just telling the height since the speed will be a constant heading into the hill since that is what it has been launched at and will not begin to decrease untill the launch power is removed which will be at the 90 degree incline. so you then have the wind resistance as it travels up and since it is twisting as it goes up you will have friction slowing it down also.

-Doug-
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I am a Mechanical Engineering major not an english major so pardon my horrible grammer

Wait a minute, Psycho... The launch power continues to be supplied through the 90 degree incline? I can't imagine that this is the case.

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First CP Visit: 1970

Well, right now they have just added the 6th section on the tower. I believe it was proven earlier that each section is about 55 feet. Therefore, it is now about 330 feet tall. Space Spiral has finally lost it's title as tallest ride in the park!

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-Chris Woodard
"If you're standing in an uncomfortable position, that means you are in the right position because you are riding Mantis!" - Mantis ride op doing spiels on closing day.

No, it's not the case, and that's yet another thing to take into consideration for more exact answers. What you could do is take the speed at the end of the launch (the top speed), use it as a tangental velocity, find the radius of the pullup (probably an estimate), and solve for the tangental velocity once it hits vertical with rotational kinematics (theta would be around 1.57 radians). There are tons of other things to factor in also, such as the rotational inertias of the wheels of the train and such, but most of these other factors will ahve a very minimal effect on the speed/height, maybe changing them by a couple mph or feet at most.

By the way, you could also use conservation of energy to solve for the top speed/height of top hat, but remember that the train will have some velocity at the top, so it would be KE(initial) = Ug + KE(final). And that is, of course, ignoring all the non conservative forces such as friction.

I love physics. :)

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L-TH-TW-B... "Meh"
Wicked twists: 11
*** This post was edited by Majin Heero 11/20/2002 4:11:05 PM ***

You all are way too smart for your own good. Ha. I think it's great and find it humurous that it has come down to this. Hey CP, look waht you've done to us! Stop the madness and make the announcement!

Peace I'm Out

They're makin' my head hurt.

MrScott

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"If we go any faster, she'll blow apart for sure!"

I was assuming that after the pullup the speed would be the calculations that I poasted above not including the pull up since I did not know how to find that since we dont know the specs on the pull up remember my calculations are theoretical I was just giving some insight we still wont know for sure till the announcement

-Doug-
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I am a Mechanical Engineering major not an english major so pardon my horrible grammer

Ok hey i'm new y'all... and i've gotta say i barely ever get pissed, but everyone is OVER analyzing this whole height thing. messing with your calculations, figuring out where on the power tower this camera is and basing your guess off that... saying you're not gonna bother riding it unless it's over 400 ft... hello??? yeah 350 ft or so just isn't worth it is it?
ok here's my point... i didn't read thru all 7 pages of this thread, so this might have already been mentioned... look at the tower. near the top (of the current construx) the "spine" begins to angle in a bit. don't you think the backbone of the tower and the track might come pretty close to being together? if so, that spine has quite a few feet to go until they reach a common point (peak). and look at cp's history with height/coasters... tallest in the world numerous times (gemini, magnum, mf) and tallest "of it's kind" coasters, etc. it's gotta break SOME records.
so put down your calculators, it's not going to make the announcement come any sooner, and just wait. predicting it will make it seem like a longer wait and a waste of time. be glad you have a park like this and that you're not in montana, relying on cow tipping for fun.
i know this might give me a few enemies, but i couldn't help but laugh at a bunch of these posts. just be excited we're getting what we're getting.

Okay. You're right.

Wait a minute......naahhhhhhhh. Guessing is half the fun.

-'Playa

(who notes that if facts were in vogue, who'd watch tabloid TV?)

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The CPlaya 100--6 days, 9 parks, 47 coasters, 2037 miles and a winner.....LoCoSuMo.

I have to say that the reason that I wanted to do thoes calculations is because it was something to do to pass the time waiting for that so ever awaited announcement that is about all

-Doug-
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I am a Mechanical Engineering major not an english major so pardon my horrible grammer

Hey--don't knock cow tipping;)

Back to the physics! The coefficient of friction is gonna be the same, but it'll affect the speed of the train more or less depending on how many Gs it pulls since

(F due to friction)=(Mu)*(Force perpendicular to Surface)

Thinking about this--heavier trains will indeed have a harder time reaching the summit of the tophat--because of friction in the pullup. Also speedier trains will be slowed more because of the friction in the pullup--thus we CONCLUSIVELY know that we know NOTHING. Okay, maybe we know that we aren't getting anywhere. But its all fun anyway.

Next problem!

If they use trains like MF has, I thought i read that they weighed like 13,000 pounds each. I think a lot of uummph will be required to get something like that over 400 feet in the air. It will be interesting to see how it's done,I think this is the reason it seems they are going so quickly with construction,I think they want to have a long testing period.

Been a while since I took a physics course, but one thing I think I remember is friction is never constant. Am I right, or do I need to go back to class? ;)

Aaron

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17 straight years of real thrills and counting...

The coefficient of friction between two surfaces is a constant (between 0 and 1). The frictional force is equal to the coefficient of friction times the normal force, which is the force perpendicular to the surface. On level ground, this force is just weight, however when you get to inclines, you have to take the angle of inclination into account (mg cos theta). Also, if there are other external forces, you need to take those into account also. And when an object is rotating against a surface (such as the pullup or pullout of #16), the centripetal force (mv^2/r) has to be taken into account. The work of friction is not constant, because it is the frictional force times the varying distance over which it is applied. So I don't know if that's what you are talking about or not. But I guess I gave a brief background on friction...

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L-TH-TW-B... "Meh"
Wicked twists: 11
*** This post was edited by Majin Heero 11/20/2002 11:27:34 PM ***