homestar92

That was a portion of the queue line from Son of Beast. It is also still used during Halloween Haunt as the queue for the Wolf Pack maze. I never was in the park during Son of Beast's time as an actual operating coaster, but it appears from signs of obvious patches in the concrete that the line once wrapped around and went all the way to the Action Zone midway next to the restroom that's over there, but I may be wrong about that.

Drivel like that article are the reason that I try very hard to distance myself from the term "coaster enthusiast" if I'm being totally honest.

I guarantee that you do not know a single person who you could place on the top of a cliff with no information about its height and have them be able to differentiate between a 285 foot drop and a 300 foot drop. Also, the only time you look down on a coaster is when you're going down the lift hill. Which drops into a valley. Which means, by your line of sight, you are looking down more than 300 feet. If the anticipation of climbing the lift hill is what you're basing the excitement argument on, I kinda get it, except you also don't climb up 300 feet on Leviathan because its station is a good 20 feet or more off the ground. ^ Responding to @BoddaH1994 now: want to see another good one? (pic taken from https://rcdb.com/3385.htm)

Your definition can be whatever you want it to be, but your definition is not what has been generally agreed upon by the amusement park industry. By your definition, Magnum XL-200 is not a hypercoaster, and you are literally the first person I've ever heard try and make that claim.

OK, sure, but your example is extremely different than this case. We're talking about a difference of 13 feet. Would the giga suddenly become a giga if they dug a 13-foot pit under the lift hill? If so, then it should be considered a giga now. It's extremely pedantic to try and argue that our coaster is not a giga when its drop is equal to or greater than that of Millennium Force (depending on whether you go by the 299 or 300 foot stat of Millennium Force's drop, as I've seen both used). The generally agreed upon definition is that extreme cases like your example don't count, but if one stat is over 300 and the other is within reason, then it counts. Hence why Apollo's Chariot is universally considered to be a hypercoaster and Magnum also is, despite both having one stat under 200 and one over, but why High Roller wasn't considered to be anything significant despite being 900 feet off the ground.

B&M likes having obnoxiously high brake runs. There's an entire Arrow Looper underneath the brake run of Leviathan!

The Banshee announcement video showed the water tower and target, Flight Deck in gray and not rethemed, and Delirium with a checkered paint job. Best to not put much stock in the non-Orion things in the video.

Orion has a longer drop than Millennium Force. Just because we have terrain that isn't completely flat and they were able to use the lay of the land to the ride's advantage doesn't mean they cheaped out. Drop height is infinitely more important than track height. If track height was the thing that made a ride great, The Beast would be laughably bad as it is never more than 30 or 40 feet off the ground besides the two lift hills.

Logically, it MUST be on Kings Island property somewhere, or have been moved elsewhere onto CSF's property. It's not a very long drive from CSF to KI, so if it left CSF, it would almost certainly be at the park by now.

What, officially, makes that park the Roller Coaster capital of the World other than their own claim on the title? Six Flags Magic Mountain has one more coaster than Cedar Point does, with yet another under construction. If Cedar Point can claim that title based on nothing, then so could Kings Island.

I mean, Eiffel Tower does have a drop, it's just very slow. So they're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

The park isn't completely flat. I don't know the topography, but if the plot of land that the coaster sits on is at a 20 foot higher elevation than where the Eiffel Tower is, it could be higher without being taller. I don't think that's it though, because the pathways are mostly flat and if you recall, Firehawk sat a little bit lower than the path to get to it.

Parking should be free as they stop staffing the parking tolls about two hours before the park closes. Admission is likely the starlight rate, which I don't remember offhand but is posted on the ticket sales booth. You might want to call and confirm though, because while they said that the front gate turnstiles will be open, they did not say that ticket sales will. It may be that only season passholders or prepaid admissions can get in after 8.

I mean, there are only 100,000 possible combinations for the lock. If we try one per second, it will only take just over 27 hours at most to crack it

So using some Regex action, I grabbed a list of every word in the english language and filtered it down to only those that are possible to spell with the letters given (I kinda made the assumption that it's a five letter word and the last letter isn't the blank). There are over 1300 words in the list. If anyone wants to go through it for things that might make sense, be my guest. Here's the full list. words.txt

Nobody is questioning that the entry plaza and other ancillary structures could have plans change. Those of us who are referencing the blueprints are trying to encourage people to temper their expectations if they think the track layout and height will be different from what's in the blueprints, especially when the construction that we've already seen is matching those blueprints to a T. We very well could get a radically different entry plaza than what's on the blueprints, but what we're not getting is a coaster that's bigger than what's shown on the blueprints. Plans for little things can and do change at the 11th hour... Plans for a 30 million dollar coaster that's been in the works for probably at least a couple years... Not so much. The only change to the coaster that would be reasonable to expect is maybe an above-ground tunnel, which would be one of those ancillary structures that could easily be added later like what happened with with Beast or Leviathan. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they advertise this thing as being just over 300 feet tall. The "zero" height on the blueprints doesn't have to be the same "zero" that the marketing people use. If they're measuring at eye level, it's probably already over 300 even if their "zero" is consistent with the blueprints.

It's also conceivable for a tunnel to be added after the ride opens. The tunnel over Beast's final helix wasn't there in the ride's opening year, and Leviathan operated for at least a little while without a tunnel since the POVs from opening day didn't have one (I don't know how long it operated without a tunnel, but I don't seem to remember there being a tunnel when I visited in May of 2014. Certainly could be wrong on that though.) And in regards to the restroom discussion, I would absolutely LOVE for a restroom to be put in there, but at the same time, the lack of restrooms in X-Base has kinda reached enthusiast meme status and I hate to see a good meme die.

We know because the blueprints have been filed with the city of Mason and filing false blueprints is not something the zoning board would take kindly to, and may, in fact, be illegal. Yes, plans can change. But plans for a 30+ million dollar coaster do not change drastically within the month before vertical construction begins. The park isn't going to file false blueprints to throw enthusiasts off their scent. Not to be mean, but the park literally does not care about enthusiasts as they are an insignificant percentage of the visitors. If all enthusiasts suddenly quit going to KI, it wouldn't even amount to a rounding error on the financial reports. The teasing campaign is for the GP who don't go to the city building and get copies of the blueprints or even follow park forums to get information. The park knows that enthusiasts will find those plans, they just really don't care because in the grand scheme, it doesn't matter.

Not to mention, you can build a coaster off of the end of a 900 foot building (which was done in Vegas), but if you only have a 10 foot drop, you're still only going to reach a speed of under 20 mph. The drop is what determines the speed of the ride.

It could be worse. We could be getting a big, bad B&M Hyper with a completely unintimidating name like Candymonium.

99% of the general public and enthusiasts would agree that a 296 foot tall coaster with a 301 foot drop is a giga, as will be the case with ours. I look at it this way: It is the drop, and not the height, that determines the ride experience of a coaster. Therefore, if there is a drop that is over 200/300, it's a hyper/giga. So Apollo's Chariot and Phantom's Revenge are Hypers. If the drop is under 200/300 feet, but the height is over and there's not some outlandish discrepancy between them (such as the "900 foot" coaster that once operated in Vegas with about a 10 foot drop) then it also counts. So Magnum and Millennium Force count despite their drops being not quite 200 and not quite 300 feet. Someone many, many pages ago mentioned that 10% is their rule of thumb. I think that's decent enough, but setting a hard line at 10% is a bit too cut and dry for me. I feel like if it was 11%, I'd count it personally.

A launch (or lack thereof) bears no meaning in classifying coasters (though no non-launched Strata exists yet, so I suppose that could change if one is ever built). So if a 445 ft version of Millennium Force were to be built, they would both just be called Strata coasters. These labels are really only used by enthusiasts though, and nobody has ever bothered to differentiate between launched vs non-launched in the realm of hyper or giga coasters, so strata would be no different. The general public doesn't need terms to differentiate them because the general public doesn't care. That's why Hersheypark building a second hypercoaster is still going to be a great move for them. As far as the GP is concerned, it's just another large (and more GP-friendly than Skyrush by a mile) coaster in the park's lineup.

Dragster is a full-length coaster. It is longer than Blue Streak, Mine Ride, Corkscrew, and is the same length as Iron Dragon and nobody claims those aren't "full length"

I mean, depending on how you count "longest", you could take that record with a not-very-tall coaster. Ka drops at a 90 degree angle, so it's drop is exactly the same as its height. Whereas, you could have a 100 foot coaster whose drop is only like 5 degrees steep and its drop would indeed have more track (and thus, be "longer" than Ka). I don't think we have that here though. With this type of calculation, Fury probably has the longest drop, but I don't feel like doing math right now.

It's 296 feet with a 301 foot drop. Expect anything else and you will be disappointed on Thursday evening. That's just the cold, hard truth of it. During the change.org petition, this forum had reached the bargaining stage of grief. We've now gone back to denial.