Sidders

Haha great news guys! Hopefully its not too short a notice! I'm sure everyone will do well. The first round is on Thorpe! There's a couple of questions on Thorpe's past too so I've tried to incorporate different eras to give everyone the chance to show off knowledge others might not have. Time to start swatting up! Here's the current table of players! And yes, I can confirm the Thorpe Park Round will have 60 points available!

Okay a date has been set! If you are joining in the quiz, please be present in the Chat Room at 8pm on Thursday the 11th July. Anyone who is not playing could you be considerate enough to avoid the Chat Room for roughly an hour*. *But tbh, why would you not want to play?

Thorpe Park Mania, in conjunction with THORPE PARK, are pleased to announce the all-new TPM Quiz 2.0! Its time to join in the coaster-related hoo-ha now that its finally here and prove that you know your B&M from your Intamin, your Merlin from your Tussauds, and your Disney from your Six Flags! But what happened to TPM Quiz 1.0 I hear you ask? Well in short it never happened. An unfortunate combination of being too busy/lazy, early test runs not running smoothly enough to bring to a forum setting (and I sauntered off to Uni for a year, too), meant that the whole thing had to be cancelled at the last minute. But now it's back, bigger and better than Stealth ever, and the team and I invite you to take part and showcase your knowledge of both UK and international stages of parks, rides and coasters! Nearly a year in planning (a ridiculous length I know but take that TTF!), and after rigorous test runs (eight of them!), question styles and scoring has been pruned, round infrastructure has been perfected, and I finally managed to build a spreadsheet powerful enough to collate all the potential data of an optimistically popular turn-out for the quiz! A time and a date is yet to be decided, but it will be held in the Chat Room at some point every week. The time and date will be well-publicised on the forum though if for some reason you miss the quiz there will be ways of completing the round without losing points for questions you miss. THE LIVE QUIZ The live quiz will commence in Chat soon and run over four weeks, each week with a different category, so obviously there will be some dedication required to the time and dates the quiz will run. If for some reason you cannot make the live quiz, I have a solution which will be explained later. Each round will consist of 20-25 questions. I am pleased to announce that Quiz 2.0's categories will be: Thorpe Park Round Records Round Picture Round Multiple Choice Round Naturally, a quiz on our home park is going to be the first one The Thorpe Park Round will concern rides, notable events, installations and geography, as well as a general knowledge about Thorpe's past. As a quick overview of the others: The Records Round deals with world record-holding or notable roller-coaster/ride records; the Picture Round will involve answering questions with associated pictures/layouts of rides; and the Multiple Choice Round is as it sounds, at least question/answer-wise. More on this rather special round later. SCORING In each of the quizzes, questions of varying difficulty will be asked. For the first three rounds, this is what you might see: Q1) What was Thorpe Park's tallest ride in 2000? (2) The number in the brackets after the question represents the number of points awarded for a correct answer. The harder the question, the more points available. Some questions may ask for more than one answer, and there will be according points available, e.g. - Q2) Name any two of the lakes surrounding Thorpe Park. If you can't name two, name as many as you can. (4) No points will be lost for incorrect answers or unanswered questions. It is hoped players will, in good faith, refrain from using the Internet in these rounds. In the fourth round, scoring works a little differently. Information on this round will be available in this thread after the Picture Round is finished. THE TABLE Here is the table from the latest test runs (notice how tight the scores are, with only 0.3 between 1st and 2nd place!) : As you can see, there are raw marks, which are collected from the actual quiz marks. Because the number of available marks differs in each quiz there needs to be a uniform mark scale (UMS). The UMS is dependent on how hard I make the quiz. In the above example the UMS stays at 40, despite the quiz having more marks than that. The result is the UMS mark allows me to work out you proportionate scores on a regular scale (40), instead of one that jumps all over the place (45, 47, 63, 47). You can see how the number of raw marks change in each round, but the UMS works out a ratio according to, in the first table example: 41 (points achieved) / 47 (total marks available) = X (UMS score) / 40 (UMS). Therefore: X = 34.9. Don't even know if that makes sense, that's why Excel is doing the maths for me. Rest assured the table works. I wouldn't have spent a year on it to have a mistake in it! Why so difficult though? Well, it actually makes it easier for me to calculate having uniform marks at the end of each quiz, but harder for you guys to see who's in the lead right up until the last minute when the winner is announced! THE CHAT ROOM The Chat Room is where it happens. Please be in the Chat Room is you're playing the quiz, and have the kindness to refrain from entering if you are not playing. Special moderator guidelines will be in force during the quiz, so please, no cheating or distracting players, especially if you are a non-player. PRIZES To be confirmed! This is Marc's bizniz. There should be a prize for first, second and third place y'all! Could get very exciting! IF YOU MISS THE LIVE QUIZ It's not the end of the world, don't worry. I realise this will be the case for many people. What I plan to do is keep the questions 'live' for a week, until three hours before the next quiz the following week. If you miss part of the quiz, tell me which ones you need in Private Chat in the Chat Room, and I will send them after the quiz. Anyone who misses the entire quiz will have to PM me stating so, within a week after the live quiz has closed. However, you will only have 30 minutes to send the answers back, to keep in the same sort of time-frame the other live players were given. If I do not receive your reply PM 30 minutes after I send the questions, then you will not receive any marks for that round. Please keep on your toes for my reply email. This all sounds very strict and boring but actually the quiz is a lot of fun, from what I've heard from my guinea pigs. Hopefully it'll be great fun for all. Looking forward to all you getting your geeky hats on! This could be a great success but then again maybe the failure of Quiz 1.0 suggest this could be a fail. Let's just hope for the best, ja? Sidders P.S> Those of you interested in playing, please make yourself known by posting below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWzVBGG3p1s Ricky is famous at 26 seconds.

I actually want a theme, so let's have a woodie please.

I was talking about Saw though? Saw was the UK's third and the world's seventh.

Saw set Thorpe back £13.5M by my records. I can assure you most of it was on the IP and the themeing. Gerstlauer Euro-fighters were still making a name for themselves and as Ethan states, Saw was only the third in the UK. There were a few operating in small parks in Europe at the time. The track for Saw would've been just under half the total cost of the project, as the £13.5M figure probably included the IP, the themeing elements and also the land infilling too.

Well if the Flying Fish cost £1M to relocate into storage and then resurrect just a year later, then Spinball would cost more than it would be worth. Just buy a new one. Why transport that much metal from Stoke-on-Trent to either Staines or somewhere in Wales when, for around the same price, you could build a new low-throughput spinning coaster?

Interesting point you raise there Cameron, though you have to remember that Son of Beast was built in 2000 by RCC. Newly-built Intamin coasters are prefabricated and cut with lasers in the fabrication plants. The separate parts of these coasters (I.e. El Toro, T Express, Colossos, Balder) can then fit together much better and offer a much smoother ride experience than doing all the work on the construction site. Prefabrication would allow for a much smoother inversion should Thorpe wish to add one (but to me it undermines the purpose of a woodie and the point of choosing wood over steel), and the result of this is that none of Son of Beast's problems would happen to Thorpe's woodie. Half the problems with Son of Beast came from the weight of the trains putting too much stress on parts of the wood-supported track, but the weight was necessary to get through the loop. Even after removing a whole car from each train in the middle of the 2006 season didn't help and eventually the loop was removed. It operated for a few more years but the wood had taken substantial damage because of the trains and could not be treated, hence it's defunct state since 2012. As I understand it, Outlaw Run uses modified versions of the Millennium Flyer trains to make them slightly lighter. But this probably doesn't correlate with the three inversions on its track as the entire thing is enforced with steel bents, meaning the trains could be as heavy as they liked. The reinforcement, however, has the unfortunate side-effect of making Outlaw Run look very ugly up-close. It does mean the ride needs less wooden structuring though, which could work in Thorpe's favour.

I actually think people are missing something here. The Abbey Lake peninsula, which is currently covered in trees, would serve as a palatable location for this type of coaster - much more so than the central area of the park, right outside Port Atlantis and metres from the Crash Pad. The tree coverage is dense on the Abbey Lake peninsula so Thorpe could leave a decent sound barrier for Chertsey town if they put Spinball there. From the entrance it will be visible behind Saw but it won't pull a Storm Surge and stick out like the noisy, poorly-themed coaster it sadly is. It could work well in Canada Creek. I couldn't imagine Thorpe putting a ride like Spinball at the centre of their park, not after Storm Surge single-handedly destroyed the Thorpe sky-line and any views across the park, the heap o' sh!te. I actually have a soft spot for the ride; it's no Dragon's Fury, but it's good fun. I do agree though, that it needs to leave Alton and the sooner the better. Would prefer it at Oakwood. If Thorpe are under the impression they require such a ride it would probably serve them better to simply buy a new model with a custom layout.

If they did opt for the Maurer spinning coaster, I'd much rather they'd simply by their own. Sonic Spinball might be an fun ride but Thorpe won't waste the money required to relocate it when they could spend just about as much money on a completely new coaster. If I'm honest, this time next year I think Spinball will be pencilled in for Oakwood.

I like your ideas Matt, and a lot of people seem to be hoping for a Hyper, but if there's not enough space for a flyer (though a recent NoLimits project on Island A, adhering to all current planning constraints, fitted beautifully), there where is a Hyper going to go? I've heard people suggest Monk's Walk, passing behind Inferno and onto the Abbey Lake peninsula at the other end of the park, but in my eyes Thorpe is far too small for a Hyper - those enormous parabolas arcing all the way along the back of the park would make all the other rides look minuscule - even Stealth. From the front entrance it would look impressive, but it would completely overshadow the necessity for all the other rides in such a small, cramped park. Not to mention there really isn't the space along Monk's Walk as that pathway isn't part of Thorpe's land and the envelope there can't be more than mere metres. Plus, they're fairly impossible to theme to any degree that Merlin have been showing capabilities of in recent times (The Swarm, The Smiler). I for one would be strongly against a Hyper at Thorpe, unless they can find an alternative place for it after the much more desirable rumoured Woodie is built. P.S. But even if a Woodie is built (and it will probably be an impressive height in itself) would that not render the Hyper coaster option surplus to demand? They'll have covered airtime, and Hyper's only really offer speed and height on top of that, which a carefully designed Woodie could also incorporate tactfully.

In terms of steel, they could only really add an airtime machine, as that's what the park's missing. That's what the UK's missing. If they were to build anything else with the current park offering the unprecedented array of thrills and world records, they would either be competing with themselves or with other parks, and by extension, themselves once again (no other UK non-Merlin owned park really threatens Thorpe). So here's the deal with Thorpe's current coaster spread: They have a sit-down multi-looper, a modest inverter, Europe's fastest accelerating launched coaster, a badly-built jaunt through a few trees in a matchbox on wheels (or the world's first horror coaster and steepest free-fall, if you please), and the UK's first wing coaster. The even have a mildly thrilling dark coaster/rave. Their current arsenal rules out most of the steel options available to them that will offer something different. For example, even an intense B&M flyer will draw comparisons in ride experience to The Swarm, and inevitably Air too. A Dive Machine will draw comparisons to Saw and obviously, Oblivion as well. Anything with a notable number of inversions will overshadow Colossus and The Smiler. So say they chose airtime, but go for a steel model like an Intamin Blitz or a Mack Launched Coaster. Then the comparisons with Stealth and Rita start. Not to mention Stealth in such close proximity, with this coaster possibly being two-thirds its height it'll diminish Stealth's imposing factor. All these designs also have their own logistical problems I.e. theres no underground envelope for a Dive Machine and there's seriously not enough space for a decent-length flyer or even the Intamin or Mack models. I realise this is a very reductionist and fairly soulless method of deducing what coaster best fits Thorpe's needs but, theme aside, this is what marketing will be looking for - pocket-holes in Thorpe's sprawling coverage of statistics. The biggest one, staring them right in the face, is a woodie. It knocks two birds with one stone as it'll be packed with air-time and provide the UK with a new kind of thrill not seen for seventeen years.

That's the face of PAIN. Excellent photos stretchy!

Probably won't happen till Saw's birthday guys! Stealth's will be the next birthday ERT, surely?

Lol what's a Rameses?

I'm shocked that on this whole circuit there is only one piece of track that is banked. And it looks like it's only done as an "outwards banked turn" element. Like it's a bonus to riders and they should be happy for it. And what a hideous lift. Looks like a gross, oversized electricity terminal. Is this really the pinnacle of modern coaster design from Maurer?

Very true Benin, and there's certain to be a reason why The Swarm doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere on Thorpe's website homepage or any of the sliding screens on there, except for one small paragraph which is practically small-print compared to all the raging capitals and screaming heads all over the site. Instead, Saw and Stealth appear most obvious, so you do have a point. However, The Swarm was never really marketed as being "intense" and certainly not to the extent of Th13teen's mis-marketing. It's main marketing angles were the "UK's first winged rollercoaster", the "near misses" and in a lesser light, the "gut-wrenching inversions". None of which demonstrates anything that suggests The Swarm is more intense than it actually is. Any expectation of intensity was a result of the GP not thinking there's anything else required for a good coaster except intensity, jarring transitions and IPs.

My thoughts exactly! Cheers Josh, I'm sure a short woodie would help planning, but I'd love for Thorpe to go all-out with this build if it's true they are indeed building a wood. Early hints suggest it's Intamin, and Intamin don't do compact woodies very well

Hmm. Over the past few days of preparing a quiz for TPM I've had to study a lot about Liseberg. Looks like a great park! Has some great-looking rides like Balder, Kanonen (maybe) and now Helix.

You got the joke then You're right pluk, there was only one negative comment I saw and there's been thousands of positive ones. The negative was was literally: "Went on one in Margate. No big deal" Margate?! Lol. Come on Thorpe! Do us proud!

Had a thought. A Thorpe thought. What if Merlin have finally realised the immense popularity of Colossos at Heide Park? It's owned by Merlin, and it once broke world records for speed and steepest drop on a woodie, and still holds the record for height at 196ft. It's certainly something Thorpe could push promotionally (they're probably not going to change their marketing angles and simply market "airtime"). I'd love a 164ft woodie but... where would it go?

Well another reason for the choice of Gerstlauer is Thorpe had an MTDP submitted to the Runnymede Borough Council outlining future development. If you click here: (Omg, the website lives on!) you can see the 2004-2009 MTDP, outlining Thorpe's installation of Samurai, Slammer, Rush, a second Detonator (never happened), Stealth, Flying Fish 2.0, and what eventually became Saw, but was originally billed as "2008 coaster" (bottom of page, under "2006 coaster - 'Icon of the park'"). Infilling (Island F) is mentioned too. In no way was the MTDP set in stone, but I'm sure Tussauds intended "2008 coaster" to be built in 2008. It, and Stealth, would've been the installations the rest of the MTDP was shaped around because those are the rides that would impact the surrounding towns and villages the most. Whatever ride was in planning (Tussauds' rumoured woodie possibly?) got pushed back after the purchase of Thorpe by Merlin. After dicking about with a few designs (the GCI woodie, the rumoured B&M flyer) it looks as if time wasn't on their side as the plans for Saw only materialised in November 2007. Gerstlauer was comparatively cheap and compact, which corroborates the rumour that the flyer was scrapped because of cost and size. For instance: would-be-sister flyer Air cost £12M, has no real themeing structures and covers over 200m end to end. Saw has tonnes of themeing (in comparison), an IP, and covers just over 100m for end to end, and only cost £13.5M. More expensive, yes, but compared to the sheer scale of Air which has no themeing, we can see how much more Thorpe would be paying to buy and theme a flyer even to Saw's standards. Being compact also meant that given the limited time frame to complete Island F for coaster construction, the actual hardware of a Gerstlauer could be erected very swiftly, which was necessary given all the extra themeing that needed to be done (windmill anyone?). Something important to note then is that this MTDP came out under the Tussauds reign, and the image provided with "2008 coaster" was this one: ... Which cause something of a tizzy with the enthusiasts at TPG and TPM because it looks very much like a flyer layout. Too much in fact - it's Air's layout. And so the rumour of the flyer was born. Of course, this image only demonstrated the size of the coaster they wanted to build: "of similar scale to Nemesis Inferno" says the MTDP. Inferno is 2,460ft long (source) and Air is 2,755ft (source), hence the layout being used. It's not very clear here, but the proposed layout in this MTDP takes up much more of the available space on the Abbey Lake peninsula (and it's the coaster's high point), just like the woodie did. The Merlin GCI woodie was proposed to be 3,117ft (note the five year difference between this MTDP and the woodie plans, hence the slight increase in scale as Island F was not there in 2004). So the woodie plans were well-researched and subtle hints towards them extend as far back as 2004. But it is possible this extension in length was a contributing factor in its denial on top of all the other constraints I've visited in my earlier post. Saw's length is 2,362ft, so its in-keeping with the original plans much more than the GCI woodie. So in my opinion, Saw was a quick fix after the ditching of a possible three previous coaster plans. Pushed for time and funds after the Merlin take-over in 2007, Thorpe dropped the Tussauds plans and after contemplating alternatives of their own, went for a cheap, easily marketable alternative to a woodie or a flyer. Both the woodie and flyer would have worked out more expensive not just for hardware, but also because of the required deforestation on the Abbey Lake peninsula. Which in my books means either of these too designs is up to construction in 2015, with possibly the flyer being more plausible. EDIT: Very interesting Ryan! Why would they be over there with four-year old plans? Hmm... EDIT EDIT: As for the Saw IP, I don't buy that it was part of the early planning process, or it would've been dropped alongside whatever plans Tussauds had for the park when that company ceased to exist. Not to mention that even after the construction of the coaster began, there were those 13 viral videos (of which only three or four materialised) and nothing so much as winked at the suggestion of a Saw IP until a period of silence and then the name was announced. I recall it was a Tuesday. Anyone remember the last video we received before said name announcement? With the builders doing a Jumanji and discovering a disturbingly noisy box on the building site? The one that they all ran away from when the opened it? Yeah, that one. Remember the 13 scratched into the lid? I often amuse myself by thinking Saw was originally meant to be called Th13teen, and then along popped Lionsgate with the Saw IP and the Th13teen name and brand was dropped and given to Alton in 2010. It always did strike me as peculiar that Dark Forest rather arbitrarily appeared at Alton... And Th13teen's theme could've easily slotted into Canada Creek...

And I would dispute this. If what you're referring to is investment than Benin's post above disproves this. But if you mean it in terms of thrill then Vampire and Dragon's Fury have a few words to say to you. They're arguably more thrilling and scary than Rattlesnake. The only scary thing about Rattlesnake is at the time it was built Maurer Sohne didn't know how to turn corners.

Fore-note: Please excuse the essay. I wrote as I thought and researched. Maybe it's just me, but I swear the GP opinion of woodies wasn't the only thing stopping Thorpe from building one. I swear at one point TPG/TPM reported that the reason Thorpe won't build a woodie was due to planning and logistical constraints pertaining to the typical wooden coaster support system. First off, Thorpe comprises of reclaimed land. Island A and E (the proposed locations for the next coaster, though A is much more likely given the scale of the proposed coaster) are very young land masses. They can't be more than three years old in the case of Island A and two in the case of Island E. By 2015/16 they could still be too young to place woodie supports on them. Wooden coasters require a far denser support system than the slender poles of 21st century steel coasters (e.g. The Swarm, Stealth). I'm guessing the amount of footers required could potentially weaken the solidity of reclaimed land like Thorpe's, causing unstable foundations. Which leads me to the next restriction on planning. The visibility across the park would be drastically impaired with the density of wooden coaster supports. You look at Stealth from the park entrance and you can still see it through The Swarm. You can do the same with Colossus and Saw if you're at the top of Depth Charge. You wouldn't be able to do that with woodie supports. I was under the impression that Thorpe's coasters were not allowed to impair visibility across the park or obstruct views from outside the park. Nevertheless, as the plans from the Thrills Workshop Josh kindly provided point out, Merlin were considering a woodie, even after the rumoured Tussauds one got shafted. No-one knows why these were shelved (was it denied planning permission? or was it a result of Merlin's "market" "research"?) but what is known is they were just that - shelved, not scrapped (according to interviews with Thrills Workshop staff). The plans speak for themselves: a GCI woodie; it was going to be a very intense, high-speed wooden coaster with many turns and high points and... biggest clincher of them all, it was going to be built on Island F at the very edge of the park. Said island is also reclaimed land. Completed in 2007, it had only two years to solidify. So in writing this, I realise the first theory going against the construction of a woodie (unstable foundations) is rubbished as there really can't be much difference in the solidity or porosity of reclaimed land just over two thousand feet away. But then another spanner gets thrown into the works when you consider the parameters of the mythical 2009 GCI woodie. Built under Saw's planning constraints, the woodie would only be a maximum of 27m (88ft) (saucy source). If an 88ft woodie in a section of the park closest to Chertsey town got declined, then how is a 50m (164ft) woodie going to materialise at the extremity of the park closest to Thorpe Village and still manage to clear noise and visibility abatement? Island A creates a new geographical edge for Thorpe Park and to stick a woodie there could be asking for denied planning permission. Granted, Thorpe Village hosts a view of the park including the two tallest rides: Stealth and The Swarm, but Stealth is nigh-on invisible in a London sky and The Swarm is only 38m tall, as well as it's high point being some 650ft further from Thorpe Village than that of the 50m coaster proposed for Island A. A possible reason for the shelving/scrapping of the GCI woodie was that even when Saw's original plans were released for Island F, they needed to be revised due to deforestation issues on the peninsula in Abbey Lake (fewer trees meant a smaller sound barrier for Chertsey). See: the original Saw plans with the ridiculous decision to have two MCBRs, where the track ventured further out into the peninsula that can be seen with the final layout: Okay, yes, Saw's only in construction here but you can see where the track is meant to be. It's important to note that the noise pollution would only become an issue with the removal of the trees (Logger's Leap happily sits on the peninsula), hence the layout revision in late 2008. The "Canada Creek Coaster", for comparison. So it would seem that a woodie's inherent noise levels may have been an issue for the GCI woodie. The wooden coaster really didn't stand a chance on Island F, as half of it's layout was on this tree-covered peninsula, the removal of said trees would surely cause issues with the locals in Chertsey. There also being no trees acting as a sound barrier on Island A pose a huge problem for a woodie, as you can't exactly dampen the sound of a wooden coaster with sand or foam, like you can a steel coaster. And to put the proverbial nail in the proverbial coffin, that interview posted by scarycoasterboy on the previous page with Nick Varney about the potentiality of a Merlin woodie was recorded just this year (the source lies within), which says that their view on the GP's view of a wooden coaster still hasn't changed since their GCI woodie plan overhaul in 2008. I'd love to be proven wrong, but Thorpe are going to have to get over some very stringent planning restrictions just to get permission to build the thing. Add to that the extremely limited space for a woodie intending to be anywhere up to 164ft (Island A is big, but even with the Treasure Island peninsula added onto the construction area, it's a tight fit), and the perceived impossibility of marketing such an supposedly 'outdated' and 'unsafe' design, and you can see why Varney still thinks it won't happen. It would be much easier and financially secure for Thorpe to simply whack a flyer in the space. Spare us the pretzel loop please? P.S. But who knows? Maybe the début of Outlaw Run has caught their attention and maybe they're reconsidering the idea of a hybrid woodie for Thorpe with the comparatively marketable tagline of "Europe's first looping woodie/wooden coaster". Personally I'd prefer a thoroughbred GCI/Intamin (Intamin only if it was akin to Colossos at Heide Park) as whacking load of inversions on a woodie defeats the object of it being a woodie and not a steel coaster.