RuthlessAirtime

Ahhh the old drop height vs actual height debate

If it's not taller than 300 feet I will eat my shoe. If we get a 290 foot 4 wide B&M hyper, that will be one of the strangest choices Cedar Fair has ever made. I don't see how that's possible. The backbone footer we have a blueprint for sets the backbone at 40 degrees.

I gotta say, I am seriously enjoying the levels of conspiracy and mystery surrounding the hype for this ride. ”Giga-Gate” has gotta be one of the most contentious lead-ins to a ride announcement and I’m loving it lmao

I hadn’t considered this. The fact that the layout, if final, wasn’t included in the Project X plans is fishy to me. Why wouldn’t it be there? That looked pretty finished to me. If they’re about to start pouring footers, wouldn’t more plans be available via the city? The detail involved in highlighting other things in the image is weird too. Almost as if that was actually a plan for Antique Autos, and sprucing up that stretch of Coney Mall was part of that plan and the giga was added later. It would be nuts if the layout really was faked by someone just wanting to stir something up because the detail involved would basically mean it would have had to originate internally. Personally it would be nice if that turned out to be the case, but I think Occams Razor applies here and someone probably just made a mistake and posted it when they shouldn’t have. If anyone decides to go to the municipal building to search for more, try to ask if you can see blueprints filed by KI in like the last month. I only asked for Project X because someone mentioned that as a code name here.

Looking at it from a purely financial standpoint that kinda makes sense. They might be banking on higher visitorship purely on the merit of that year being their 50th. Following that logic, it makes sense you'd want to open a major attraction 2-3 years prior to boost attendance, and then let the 50th anniversary do the attendance work on its own.

I am currently somewhat surprised they seem to be going the giga route just 2 years before their 50th. Seems like a huge project you'd want to open for your 50th anniversary. If they had something even more significant/longer surprised for their 50th I'd be less surprised. It would explain the small footprint of this ride – there's a lot of land around the backside of X-Base and it would make sense if they were saving that land for something insane on their 50th. I wouldn't put too much stock into that idea though, since that would be two huge investments back to back in 2 years which is uncommon for KI.

Reposting this from earlier. I'm a fan of the Orion name. Anything celestial themed would be awesome. I think white trains with black/orange "spaceship" markings would be sick. Anything that makes it feel like we're going to space. A bright blue/teal LED light bar on the lift would be cool. @ohiocoasterfan had the right idea with an LED tunnel. Doesn't have to be underground, just any tunnel with some kind of lights inside (maybe after the first drop) to emphasize the sensation of moving at warp speed. Above all, I want this song to be playing in the station (or something similar). Anything to give off the vibes that we're about to go on an epic cosmic journey.

In a completely unrelated note, I drew a layout that would fit perfectly in that opening. Any resemblance to any known or unknown leaked layouts is completely coincidental. Mental exercise time - pull up your phone and let 8-10 seconds go by on your stopwatch and think about how long that is on a roller coaster. That photo of the layout from that perspective makes it look so short

Don’t be a gatekeeping pedant and bring bad vibes into the thread lmao The only bad vibes allowed here are spirited disagreements regarding the giga

Airtime Immelmann turnaround

Alright @SonofBaconator I tried the same measurements and I'm gonna post some screenshots here. Diamondback measurement was tricky because it's not a true top-down measurement so I mostly went by footer locations along the ground. My tracing looks really weird because of the perspective of the 3D elements on google maps. Some of the markers are placed by Google as "up in the air" on the 3D object of Diamondback's track, so try not to pay too much attention to the weird perspective of some of them that was distorted by me zooming out. Diamondback: 4,546 feet NOT accounting for hills Mystery Giga: 4,401 feet NOT accounting for hills. I'm not going to directly host the image here of the giga overlay because it has been deleted before. PM me if you want the image overlay. Worth noting that the giga layout image was a bit tricky to line up with Google Earth because it was stitched together and doesn't quite match. It's super super close though. Soooo Diamondback Length Not accounting for hills: 4,546 feet True length with hills: ‎5,282 ft Based on my measurements, Diamondback's hills add roughly 736 feet to the layout. If we assume the Mystery Giga's hills are going to be proportionally more gigantic, we might be able to expect somewhere in the ballpark of an extra 1,000 feet added to the 4,401 foot layout estimate I got to give us somewhere around 5,400 feet. Maybe. That's assuming we have some truly gigantic airtime hills though. Remember that Diamondback has a stretch of large airtime hills, and another stretch of several smaller airtime hills that add a lot of distance to the layout, so our mystery giga would have to have a generous number of massive airtime hills for the true length to be as long as we'd like. I'll let you guys do with this info what you will.

Yeah that follows logically. Just depends on the type of coaster we’re getting. If it’s a big burly airtime machine, we’re gonna see a lot of distance added to the 4,600 estimate. If it’s fast and low to the ground like Fury, not so much.

Someone overlaid the layout into google maps and measured the length - it’s approximately 4,600 not accounting for any ups and downs, according to them. I plan on trying this out myself this afternoon just to verify. I believe someone did it earlier in this thread and posted results but I don’t know where

I think the sentiment toward this has a lot of hand-wringing going on solely because we have confirmation of it being a giga. Like myself and others have said, every giga built has been groundbreaking in some way and we have a few drops of evidence that suggest that it’s possible this one might not be. If the contract signed forever ago was between RMC or Mack rides and not B&M and we had established that this WASN’T a giga, this conversation would likely have a very different tone right now.

I thought he was wrong too at first but now that I’m looking at the photo you posted, was he talking about the two trees left standing just inside the clearing??

The only reason I have any reservations about any of this is because of that layout. I’ve looked at it so many times and I’m totally failing to convince myself it‘s not weirdly short. The only thing that would really make it super long are stretches of truly enormous airtime hills, in which case, that just feels like a bigger Diamondback, does it not? As always, time will tell. While the layout and height calculations are a bit of a bummer seeing as they seem to suggest we won’t break any stats records, I would be okay with this if the full layout ends up being an insane ride experience. Just look at El Toro for example. That layout would look weird if it was presented the way ours was, yet that thing is a fierce airtime machine and is beloved by many. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still excited, just puzzled by the layout. Hoping someone can dig something else up from city hall in the coming days and give us a few more pieces here.

There’s very little doubt it’ll be 300 feet. The question is exactly how far over 300

I would be happy to get a giga, but overall I would feel robbed. These are my reasons: Getting a giga is a one time opportunity for a park - once you build a giga it is extremely unlikely you’ll ever get something taller or faster. Only a couple parks have ever had that happen. If you’re going to build a giga at all, either go all out and build something that blows everyone’s socks off, or build something else entirely if you’re not willing to go the extra mile. King’s Island is in a unique position with the amount of land and topography they have to do something incredible with a giga. It would be a shame if they wasted that opportunity to build something “meh” in the interest of the minutiae of shareholder interests/Cedar Fair financial reasons posited by the suits upstairs etc. As far as KI is concerned, consumer opinion for the last 10 years or so has been that “once KI gets a giga, it will be an experience that is a step above the rest.” It would be a laughably tone-deaf move by Cedar Fair to ignore this expectation in the interest of VERY TINY financial details. Many of the Gigas that have been built have one upped the one before it in some way or another - it would be really sad if this was the first backtrack in the lineup of gigas built so far. It would be a sad indicator of King’s Island being more interested in building something “just decent” instead of being interested in providing extremely unique/groundbreaking ride experiences. For that reason, I absolutely want some kind of record broken and I don’t feel selfish or entitled for wanting that for the reasons listed above.

It feels like the code is somewhat broken, with a lot of question marks here and there. We know it will be a giga. We know it’s B&M. We know where in the park it will be built. Those are about the only things we can guarantee right now. The leaked layout has been a source of consternation for many of us so far. The sources are dubious and super weird, so as far as I’m concerned, believing it is either real or fake is totally fair game. I am personally a fence sitter. Even if we accept the layout is real, there’s still a ton of question marks. We don’t know exactly how tall it will be, we don’t know how fast, we don’t know how long the track is, we have only a vague sense of what elements will be present. The layout and current info tells us very little about any of this - all it provides are some super rough estimates. We have somewhat cracked the code, but the big question so far is “what will the giga actually do?” In my opinion, that’s like 75% of the equation here. Until one of us finds more blueprints, we’re given teasers, or are fed some drip of information, all we’re doing is having fun spitballing

Do you work in power engineering? This strikes me as the type of intuition only a substation engineer would have

That all depends on if we believe the leaked layout. There's been some folks split on that one here. It's possible. It's also possible that the height estimates thrown out could be off by a bit. Not sure if it could be enough to make it taller than Fury or not.

I kinda forgot about all the coordinate work that went into this. There's been a lot going on heh. Ok I'm team giga again ignore my post

I forgot about this. Fury's station is 50 feet long and Leviathan's is like 60. If we go with 50 feet for our station, the horizontal lift hill run is more like 400/450ft long. That makes a lot more sense. For the record, the trigonometry along the backbone there brings it to 335'-377' not accounting for the curve at the top, assuming we stop halfway between the two largest supports

Someone needs to march into the municipal building armed with a yardstick and ask to see the originals.