TombRaiderFTW

This might be a silly question, but have you been to any of the parks before? I'm assuming you haven't, but it doesn't hurt to ask. I have only been to Kings Dominion out of the parks you're discussing, so I can't offer objective advice. I do think Kings Dominion is a fantastic park, but it wouldn't be fair of me to just recommend the KD/BG trip just off that. But since you mentioned what you did about your dad, I'd probably suggest the KD/BG trip anyway. People I've talked to seem to highlight Busch Gardens' focus on the overall park experience, rather than just the rides (which are a very large part of Cedar Fair parks' atmospheres--or at least the ones I've been to.) I'm sure others who have been there can give you more details about what all Busch Gardens offers. Plus, if you do want to experience a Cedar Fair-esque selection of rides, you do also have Kings Dominion to experience in the KD/BG trip. In my humble opinion, Kings Dominion has one of the best collections of rides of any park. And this is coming from a fellow wood coaster guy. Grizzly, in my opinion, is severely underrated; it's got a solid mix of airtime, laterals, and classic coaster pacing. I actually really liked Hurler when I rode it in the front seat, despite the trims. Rebel Yell was significantly smoother in 2010 than Racer, and it offered more airtime than the average summer Racer ride. The steel coasters aren't anything to sneeze at, either--Dominator, Volcano, Intimidator, and Avalanche are unique, great rides that I'm incredibly jealous to not have at Kings Island. Their Flight of Fear is (or was, anyway, in 2010) much smoother than ours and doesn't stop on the MCBR, and I do prefer it to ours. And The Crypt is wonderful! And they have Antique Cars. And Flying Eagles! And... ahhhh. I've got to stop now. I'll be typing all night. I didn't even get into how beautiful that park is. It's Kings Island's evil-in-the-best-way-ever twin. Also, watch out for Berzerker, because that thing will lure you in and try to kill you. It looks all innocent, sitting there to the left of their International Street... Don't believe the charming "looping swinging ship" act--it will squish all the air out of your lungs. You heard it here first.

^ Nope. Oddly enough, I've actually zero loading issues on my phone in the past few weeks; it used to be the only place I had problems. The site's been doing pretty well for me. It's just acting weird out of nowhere tonight.

Is the site crawling tonight for anyone else? I'm on my computer, and it's taking a good 15-30 seconds to load new posts. Occasionally, it will take up to a minute or more to load a topic.

That's a really bright orange. I really like it! It looks sharp and contrasts nicely with the gray.

I'm suddenly very aware of the fact that I've only been on one wooden coaster with two lifts (Beast, of course.) I hadn't realized how rare that is.

Speak for yourself! Nothing tingles my spine quite like a theme park chicken strip.

^ What do you think this is, the movie Rollercoaster? Don't go blowing anything up at Kings Island, young man! Reallyreallyreallyreallyreally want to do Coasting for Kids again this year (I last participated in 2012), but the weekend it's on might not work for me to participate. But I guess that's why there's always non-rider fundraising!

Thank you, everyone, for the great help. Like I mentioned, I'm learning French currently. I do seem to get the impression that it won't hurt to know at least the basics, so I'll keep on keepin' on. Funny enough, that's how I'm learning French now. It's a nice little app that's just enough of a game to keep my interest up, but it's not so cartoony that it seems cheesy. The thing that gets me with Duolingo is how differently its approach to the language is from how I learned Spanish in high school. I'm very used to learning things like standard rules for conjugating each type of verb (e.g. -ar, -er, and -ir verbs in Spanish), learning the alphabet before learning words, learning to count, etc. before plunging in headfirst and learning eons of verbs. Duolingo just kinda throws nouns and verbs at you for many lessons before they get to anything important, like how to say negative actions. It works well enough, but it's a little frustrating at times to learn present-tense verb conjugations in multiple lessons instead of seeing them all at once. At times, I get irritated with not knowing certain things in French, so I hit up Google and YouTube so I can learn it. I do feel like I'm making progress, though! On that note: I did some very light research, and I'm pretty sure numbers above 60 in French are literally the most convoluted thing ever. Can you imagine if we spoke that way in English? "Yes, I'd like to buy a season pass for fifty twenty nine dollars and sixty twenty nineteen cents, please." I'm exaggerating, but still. It's funny to me how inconvenient that is. Aussi, BB1: Merci! Je sais parler ces pronoms et ces mots. Que fais-je si je dois parler d'une chienne?! J'ai une chienne, donc je veux parler d'elle!

These are some cotter pins: (Source.) They are used to keep rods or shafts in place in assemblies. The rod/shaft usually has a hole drilled in it. Sometimes, both "legs" of the pin (the long, straight parts) go through the hole. The legs are then bent so the pin won't come out. Other times, one leg will go through the hole, but the other will go around the outside of the rod/shaft. It's all in how the pin is designed and how the pin will be used. If you have a removable ball hitch on your vehicle, it may use a cotter pin to keep the rod that keeps the removable part of your hitch in place. Here's a diagram I found via Google showing that kind of hitch assembly, where B is the rod being kept in place: (Source.) In the picture that Roarbot posted, these are the cotter pins: (Someone's bound to come up with a "Welcome Back, Kotter" joke soon...)

They're both made out of wood! (I just Koched that one up out of nowhere. I'll be here all week, folks.)

I do kinda wonder: if the Paramount aspect of it is licensed, then who is the owner/operator of the park? I mean, the place is supposed to have a Lara Croft: Tomb Raider "interactive attraction," so I'm all in, but I'm just wondering. In all seriousness: As much as I love the memories I have of our Paramount days, do the properties they're choosing to theme rides and areas out of seem really obscure to anyone else, apart from Titanic and maybe Mission: Impossible? I know the movies they named rides after at the legacy Paramount Parks weren't exactly box office record-holders, but they seemed more prominent and relevant at the time (at least to 7-to-15 year-old me, anyway.) Like, exactly how many people have been sitting on the edge of their seat, waiting for their chance to experience a Rango-themed kids' area? Then again, I also haven't been holding my breath for a chance to experience an Avatar-themed park area, either, but The Mouse seems to disagree.

I can semi-vouch for this since I do some design work with industrial chains. I haven't done very much with it personally, so I don't know exactly what kind it is by sight, but D88K sounds like it could be about right. Which, of course, means that Adventure Express' chains aren't necessarily from S&S. And that doesn't mean the chain is any less quality, either. Nor does it mean that the chain is any better quality. I actually would doubt that S&S manufactures their own chains personally, though I don't know that for a fact. Chain design and manufacturing are their own industry. Also, that's actually very intriguing about the pins... The uses I've seen for these types of chains wouldn't allow removal of the links, so it's very interesting to me to hear how the service lives are extended like that. Wouldn't it be cheaper to remove the links like you mentioned than changing the pins out, though?

Seems like it could be because of the audience. If you're going to put a picture of something math-related on the cover, roller coasters are a lot more appealing than graphs or functions. If I remember right, my high school math books had pictures of buildings on them. My college Statics/Dynamics textbook had a picture of the Falkirk Wheel.

Actually, Great Bear's wheel covers are pink and black. See here. Based on the track and train color schemes, it would likely be Batman: The Ride at Six Flags over Georgia.

The train color makes me strongly think it's Demon at California's Great America.

^ More than likely, they have a set lifetime. I would imagine metal fatigue is a pretty common issue with them. It's probably been replaced at least once before now; Don just decided to tweet about it.

^ Can we call it a potato now? Please? "The Banshee crew was awesome yesterday. Special shout-out to the potato."

In previous years, that has included replacing all hardware (bolts, washers, nuts) on the trains. I don't know whether or not there can be more to it than that. It's something they do every off-season.

Why a German village, when Banshees are from Irish folklore? Because... uh... Because I said so! Yeah. Germany and Ireland are basically the same thing, right? (That post has been filed as Reason Why I Should Not Be Allowed to Post When Tired # 1,928,375.)

In last year's edition of this topic, I think I posted something about removing or renovating Tombstone Terror-tory. While I never did get around to experiencing TTT last year, some people mentioned that some extra Cornstalkers props were moved to that trail. I don't know how well that affected things, but since TTT did get some tangible attention, I think my opinion has changed... It's time for Club Bood to go. With the drastically improved attention to detail the most recent haunts have (Madame Fatale's, Board 2 Death, Slaughterhouse, even Wolf Pack and Delta Delta Die), Club Blood sticks out like a gangrene thumb. The "value" of the haunt lies only in the shock factor of the raunchy atmosphere, and truthfully, I think it drags down the quality of the event. The house is hardly detailed, apart from the first room you enter; the entire "club" room is literally robin's egg blue-painted wooden walls. And once you get past the "club," the rest of the house kinda falls apart in terms of theme. There's a bathroom, then some long hallway with tarp strips hanging from the ceiling, then a person in a bungee harness? Then a bar? Then some meandering hallways until you anticlimactically leave? Okay. What I'd really, really like to see is a haunt semi-based on Banshee folklore. I don't mean that it should be immediately tied into the Banshee ride itself, with the logo being a modification of the existing Banshee logo and the actors resembling the Banshee in the logo and all that. That might be interesting, but it could easily and accidentally be very cheesy. Play into the idea of Banshees themselves, because, seriously--it's a legend about the spirit a woman who screams when someone is about to die violently. You couldn't script a better idea for an attraction where the employees scream. Make it a claustrophobic, foggy tromp through a German village, followed by a deep walk through a haunted forest. The village is sparsely populated by only the few villagers brave enough to venture outside so as to warn oncomers about the coven of Banshees that lurk in the woods beyond the town. The forest has its own color scheme to differentiate itself from Wolf Pack and is much more heavily wooded, requiring guests to duck and side-step branches and trees and thereby expose their backs to scareactors in wait. There also could be intermittent flashing strobes above all the walls that flash to coincide with LOUD thunder claps. (Alternatively, any remaining tombstones the park may have from Cemetery Drive could be added to the "forest," turning it into a cemetery for the villagers to warn about.) If I could think of an ending like Slaughterhouse's inflatables or Madame Fatale's curtain trick--something dramatic that adds some sense of finale--I'd suggest that, but I'm drawing blanks right now. And don't ask me what to name it!

Oddly enough, Kings Island still has their moving seats, though I doubt they're being used for anything besides spare parts. In December at the ACE Holiday Party, they were sitting outside. Here's the picture I took of them: I've got a weird minor affection for Action Theater. It never was amazing by any means, but I've got a lot of good memories of waiting in line for Spongebob 3D with friends. If there's no film this year, I hope they're able to make use of the space for Haunt--although I'm not fond of another fairly large building only being used 1.25 months out of the year.

This might be a semi-random question for a Kings Island forum, but since this is basically the only coaster forum I post on anymore and I know a few posters here have been to La Ronde: There's a decent chance that I will go to La Ronde at some point in my life. However, I can't seem to get a definitive answer from the Internet on whether or not there's any sort of language barrier involved in visiting. Montreal seems to have a huge (and even law-enforced) attachment to the French language due to its history, and everything from the roads to the rides at La Ronde have French names. It doesn't seem like there's a large number of people in Canada that speak French, but the ones that do have defended their right to do so to the place that it is severely frowned upon/fineable for businesses to greet their customers in a way that does not include French. Online sources say everything from "oh, businesses will greet you in both languages, so don't worry about learning French" to "LEARN FRENCH OR DIE". I have been learning French for the past few months, but I don't consider myself fluent in any sense of the word and probably won't consider myself as such until I've studied it for a few years. So, for those of you that have been to La Ronde: 1. Is there a language barrier at the park? Is it difficult to establish that you don't speak French (if, of course, you don't speak French)? 2. Is there a language barrier outside the park, e.g. at hotels in Montreal? It seems like most road names are in French, but I don't know how prominent the language is elsewhere. 3. What is your favorite ride at the park? (This has nothing to do with French; I'm just curious. ) Any help you all can offer is appreciated!

^ You're not the only one. Banshee follows its theme very artistically. You can imagine the ghost of a woman drifting through the first drop and dive loop.

^ Kennywood actually doesn't have gates to this day on any of its wooden coasters and on Phantom's Revenge. (I can't remember if Sky Rocket has them or not.) There's a yellow line you're not supposed to cross, and I've honestly never seen anyone not listen. Granted, I've only been to Kennywood twice, but one of those visits included a park heavily populated by really, really disrespectful and mouthy younger teenagers. And they still listened. Also, Kennywood is awesome. But that's a whole 'nother topic.

^ Actually, The Interpreter, backed by the forum administration, has asked that we capitalize trademarked names (such as Banshee, Kings Island, etc.) Capitalization outside that has not been mentioned; I would assume that is optional (except to those that care enough to capitalize other words that ought to be capitalized in the English language.) Don may have also mentioned trademarked names, but I don't remember. The idea of properly capitalizing every word or term that ought to be capitalized is not what has been promoted recently. I bother to mention this so people don't think they have to type perfectly all the time, which seems to be the main gripe when it comes to the capitalization posts. It's just trademarked names; not properly capitalizing them seems to cause substantial flack (or more) for the admins.