Dodge2002

The general public probably don't care how the ride hardware works hence why 10+ years down the line people are still genuinely questioning "how they went upside down" on hex, rather then just googling it. Going all gestapo on it isn't helping their cause though. It's just causing extra curiosity, which otherwise probably didn't even exist.

I think the fact it has been delayed is forgivable, but the lack of communication is less so. Going two months without any sort of update or even vague time frame is just insane, considering they were confident enough to lock down a May opening on two seperate occasions.

While I agree that safety comes first, The Smiler also has a very bland announcement message, however the jingle they play before an after shows a little bit of expression. And I believe the ride ops used to (I don't know if they still do) sign off their announcements with "Thank you for enjoying this message" too. Would've been nice just to have a "bing bong" or something. But hey it's not the end of the world I guess. Regardless of the theming, the announcement is also pretty odd. Its obviously intended for people inside the ride itself, and doesn't sound like an e-stop message. I'm assuming it might have something to do with accessibility? Such as Duel's announcement that they make while they stop it for wheelchair access.

Regardless of whether these "rumors" are true or not, Merlin and their teams have put a stupid amount of effort into keeping aspects of this ride a complete secret, and for someone to come along and selfishly ruin the work of a team of people who poured their blood sweat and tears into their art, just for the sake of a little bit of attention is a pretty lame thing to do anyway.

I hope considering the delays they decide to scrap the mid week closures in September and October. I personally wouldn't dream of visiting during the school trip and summer holiday season, so it looks like I won't be able to ride it until September, where my options for visiting are severely limited at the moment.

Perhaps one of the problems is that the most recent comparisson we have is The Smiler which had a highly elaborate and in your face uniform which very much suited a highly elaborate and in your face theme. Less is more sometimes. The non-descript uniform supports the idea of mystery and ambiguity of this particular ride.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but didn't the director of the VR content company just say it's not physically possible to pull of what they're trying to do yet...?

What's up with those crazy poses. It looks like they've been told to either vogue or do jazz hands.

Weekends sure but why on earth would they need off peak timed tickets during the week. I seem to recall The Swarm sat at an average of 30mins all day on its opening day. They're either expecting this ride to perform miracles for off peak attendance or it must have a dreadful throughput, if it did have a timed ticket system.

Given how "unhappy" they are with some of the elements inside,I could absolutely see them having a soft opening to get feedback on whether the public agree the ride is ready or not. And then see the ride closed shortly after for a few days for some last tweaks before the ride finally publicly opens.

I personally think the park have experimented too much with trying to streamline operations when the park hits its peaks, when instead they should be focusing more on dispersing their crowds out throughout the year. First of all they really need to introduce off peak pricing, and begin a strong marketing offensive highlighting the benefits of visiting off-peak. When people start to get wind of the idea that its cheaper to visit, and they generally won't be waiting nearly as long for the rides, people would be far more inclined to take time off of work for a visit, rather then just go at the weekend. Hell they could even introduce some sort of "maximum queue gaurantee" and offer a free return ticket if X amount of queue times go over X Mins. Considering gate price only makes up a fraction of the overall spend per guest, and a more relaxed group of customers are more likely to spend time at the games stalls and eating and drinking more, they probably wouldn't actually stand to lose anything from this. The park, by design, is always going to suffer from capacity issues. Its just physically too small to deal with crowd control in any meaningful way. They need to start thinking outside of the box on how to deal with these issues.

"Reveley says Ghost Train has been a very complicated and large scale engineering project in the making, mainly due to the custom-build full size train carriages that feature the same infrastructure you'd see on the London Underground." Finally confirmation of more than one train?

They've gotta do what they've gotta do and all, but my main issues is that given the English climate, it was literally a case of Russian roulette joining the queue as to whether it was going to stop due to the rain or not, and considering I lost that game 3 consecutive times I was a little annoyed to say the least. And in all my time I have never seen the amount of rain (which to be fair at times was somewhat heavy) bring most of the park to a standstill. So it seems like its the only logical conclusion I could jump to.

Unless this has always been the case, which I'm pretty sure it isn't, Inferno was not allowed to run in anything more than light showers today. The moment any sort of moderate rain began the ride was halted. Colossus seemed to be the same too, although only during heavier downpoor, I can't comment on the rest of the rides as I wasn't around them to hear any anouncements, but I know that availability was absolutely appalling today with each major coaster closed at least once, and Saw, Swarm and Inferno all shut at the same time for around 40 minutes. I'm assuming this is some knee jerk reaction to the Galactica "incident" last week, and I've emailed them asking about it, but it seems for the time being they don't want to take any risks...

I hope the photo op is a group one. I find it hard to believe many people would actually buy a "space selfie" from galactica when you can achieve that yourself from one of the millions of filters available online for free.