Luke_A

About that Wild Eagle vs. The Swarm construction 'race'... yeah, Wild Eagle will win in my eyes ^ Very similar to the one posted of The Swarm earlier...

Some more information here regarding the PA 2012 B&M hyper. Park managers putting a concrete box thing in the ground&Artwork images also at bottom of post! (from TPR&PAfans) Also it's gonna be the tallest coaster in Europe, stealing the crown from Silver Star.

CONSUELA! <3 and the Saw car. 10/10 No no no... I clean I clean

Woodstock! On the London Eye?9/10.

I don't like MCR either... so 3/10

Only 2 more bents until they reach end of the lift! Not sure if they will carry on going backwards or if they will build the lift up to the top of the Barrel Structure. Anyway; the first drop is looking beautiful even without the metal track on it yet. Literally cannot wait to see this thing finished&to maybe ride it next year.

tehe

Also another thing to add, I LOVE the way that when you put your address into the front page, it shows your street in the 'Swarm style' using google earth or something similar I presume. Awesome!

Brilliant! Interesting how the site is relying on Facebook so much, an interesting change to say Saw's Dev Diary etc. Oh.. and it's "Lez Cougan" is it, silly us calling him Les Would love to see Lez's page being updated with him doing video's etc, with a dedicated actor for it, warning us of what's to come and stuff like that... Hopefully the Developer Diary will be updated nice and regularly too.

It's for evacuation reasons as far as I know, if the ride breaks down on one of the Block brakes then it could be dangerous to walk down the small spiral staircases or the ones on the inside blocks. Also if the lift has to be evacuated doesn't a lift come up the side of it like this below?:

No idea what's wrong with it, but they must be waiting for a major part as it's been in the same state for about 3 weeks now... been down almost a month. As I said in my earlier post, one of the motors which turns the main boom doesn't have it's belt attached, so it must have something majorly wrong with it, with the motor or gearbox possibly... Hopefully it'll be up again before the end of the season, although I wouldn't be surprised if it's not.

I noticed this too, especially around Colossus. The Colossus Station was the worst, as the operator had to press a button on the sound panel after the FN theme had finished playing, or else the normal beatbed theme would play. Stealth's "it's only a dream" didn't play on every launch either. And yes! the happy birthday thing I heard whenever Samurai started a cycle.

Brilliant trip to Thorpe Park yesterday for Fright Nights. We arrived at the park at about 9:50, as me and my sister had to collect annual pass tickets from the advance ticket collection booths. A slow-moving 25 minute queue later and we were in, and the park was stil fairly quiet, I was also pleased to notice how all the major coasters started out on full capacity, not 1 train etc... oh and Inferno still has wheel covers missing, makes me wonder if it will ever get some of them back...We ended up staying until about 7:30, and no I didn't do any of the mazes, they're just not for me, unless I'm with friends who force me in haha Anyway, queues for rides weren't too bad all day, 40 mins was the max for Stealth and Inferno, Colossus had 70 mins at one point and Saw: The ride had 80 mins. Ended up buying a couple of fastracks for Saw, Colossus and Stealth front seats. Ride Count to follow... Stealth-5, 1 front with fastrack (single rider queue all the other times, it was being managed very well, with me waiting no more than 10mins each time!) Detonator-5 (Mainly to look at the Swarm's site… but today I had a thing for Det, Looove it!) X:\NWO-1 (first ride of the day… and I got a train all to myself Lol) Colossus-1 Nemesis Inferno-3 (all back seat rides… it's actually pretty intense in the back!) Saw: The Ride-1 Flying Fish-1 (with 5 circuits!!!) Depth Charge-1 Loggers-1 Rumba Rapids-2 CCRailway-2 Rush-1 Slammer was in a sorry state, one of the motors doesn't have it's belt which turns the gearbox below. I'm not sure... but the cables weren't visible at the top either!? It had this outside it's exit anyway. As Matt said above, the ride teams really were despatching quickly, except for on Colossus that is, why do they have to recheck the restraints so many times!? Samurai was operating with a dance track playing on about a 5 second loop I do know the song, but can't think of it's name right now Lol. The park's atmosphere is so good at night, especially with all the lights on lift hills illuminating the rides, and the park lighting with the green/blue/red flood lights. All the major coasters had a really good rock/drum style music track playing, and I've found that it's actually the first half or so of this Stealth 2009 FN plaza music:http://content.maniahub.com/audio/Thorpe/Fright%20Nights%202009/FN09%20-%20Stealth%20Plaza.mp3 Upon leaving the park, The Swarm's advertising board and Tank were nicely illuminated. Unfortunately, Les Coogan was nowhere to be seen all day.Well done if you read to here, Luke.

The Swarm construction update 8/10/11.Visited Thorpe today for Fright Nights and got quite a few construction pics for the Swarm! **Feel free to post these images to other forums, they are mine; I don't mind, just give credit to Mania Hub and Me** thank youu :)Ok, so I entered the park and went on Detonator with nothing new to see, then about 1/2 an hour later this rather large support appeared!After seeing this, I went over to the future bridge area to see if there was any more happening... I'm greeted 2 large pieces of B&M track, the construction workers were cleaning them ready to put into place.Approximately 2 hours later even more supports had been constructed. These are supports for the Zero-G roll (second inversion)Workers putting ties around the track ready for lifting.about 1/2 hour later again and a track piece for the bottom of the 1st drop is in place, but... There ARE holes for a Trim Brake here. Hopefully it won't be used too strongly but wiring was put in for it nearer the end of the day.Just so you can gauge the size of this support, it's just a bit taller than Tidal Wave, A support for the Lift Hill was also installed which can be seen in this photo, to the right.At about 4PM, plenty of Supports were now on site, seen at the bottom of this picture. As well as the Lift Hill base and motor, the motor is the blue part in the track. Nothing else really happened after the crane was put away, maybe things that weren't obviously going to be seen such as electronics were being worked on, but that's all that happened today. If construction keeps up at this pace then we've got an exciting few weeks ahead of us!Thanks for reading. Luke.

Anyone know if this years FN music for all the Major Coasters is an actual song or if it's internal to Merlin? It's like a drum&bass/Saw type of song with a rock hint to it, was booming nice and loudly in Inferno's queue! Whatever or wherever it is I want it haha

From them pics it looks like that brake run after the inline has some Magnetic brakes on it. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but on a B&M they are permanent/failsafe, much like Intamin Magnetic brakes. On Raptor it looks like the magnetic brakes bring it to a stop pretty quick, with the friction brakes stopping it to a complete halt.Also something to note: in the POV video below you'll notice how Raptor stops on it's first brake section, then moves down onto the transfer section when the station block is empty, I wonder if the Swarm will have an identical block set-up, thus making it stop on the first brake run until the station is free?

R.I.P Steve Jobs :'( http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-15193922http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

Double Post... Meh.iPhone 4SApple announced the iPhone 4S about 30mins ago... Wow! It's basically the iPhone 4 completely pushed to it's max. The camera - "An eight megapixel sensor. That's 3264 x 2448."It's also got 1080P video, everything basically upgraded/made better/ iOS5 of course with iCloud/AirPlay. Also, speech recognition (Siri) has been completely re-mastered, now you can send text messages just by telling the iPhone what you want it to send back to someone. Amazing.You can also ask your iPhone to find a wikipedia article for you... All you have to do is tell it. Keynote live stream and pics from >HERE< Well done Apple once again!

You can say that... but remember what AP day in March ended up like? I say it'll be pretty average, not really expecting it to be massively busy, then again not dead quiet. Hopefully it'll be nice and quiet this weekend.

I'm going on the 8th too Yes, you have to pay the £5 fee, you can book it online or get it on the day (I think.) The £5 fee applies to all Fright Night days.

Skrillex is set to release a new album this month, he recently confirmed this in a bbc interview with Mista Jam. Although there is no current release date, Sonny said that if it doesn't get released this month, then he will leak it himself...Anyway, the chances are that this new track from him below will be on that album. "Voltage" I think this could well be one of his best yet, can't wait to hear it in studio quality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3g42Onhbc4 Amazing.

I agree with this, it's been open on all of my visits except for one a couple of weeks ago... On the whole this season it's been pretty good up until it's had this prolonged time of downtime, which always seems to happen just before or in the middle of Fright Nights. However I think the worst ride for reliability this year has to be Samurai, it didn't open right at the start of the season, has had quite a lot of 'odd days' where it's down and also was down for about a week when Slammer went down firstly too.Slammer is a brilliant ride, but as Benin said it struggles with capacity and loading times. Although fastrack for it is only £2 for some reason, great price if it's queue's big This is a bit of a stupid question Lol, but does anyone happen to know if it might open by next weekend?

I've included funfair rides in my Top 10 list too, seeing as it says "including flat rides" 1.) Oblivion2.) Nemesis Inferno3.) KMG Speed (Preferably Craig Danter's "Oxygen", and a random fun fact... it has an awesome LED super-bright light system which has the ability to fade like normal bulbs, which when mixed in with the artwork on the ride, it looks beautiful) Picture of it below. Some say these things are 'forceless' etc, although if the car is unbalanced your ride will be pretty intense. 4.) Slammer5.) Nemesis *Scared for saying Inferno is better*6.) Tivoli Remix Orbiter (commonly known as Extreme) - The most intense ride I've ever experienced, leaving you extremely disorientated and sometimes feeling faint Anyway, I love these things, video below... 7.) Colossus8.) Stealth9.) Saw: The Ride10.) Rush OR Super Rides Super Star... Video of the Superstar(Body Count) below xDhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TCA2BYPyYM In November I'm at last getting to ride on a Mondial Capriolo (there's only one in the U.K), can't wait!