Interesting comment seeing as the ride operated as it should have. This was down to human error, not the ride. Gerst and intamin are the only really possible manufactures for the smiler anyway. Intamin would have had throughput issues so Gerst were pretty much the only option.
I would quite like to engineer the static parts of the coaster. Like the station or even help with its construction. Being a project manager on a ride like the swarm would be a dream job for me. No idea how I would go about it but a degree in civil engineering seems a good start.
I like woodies that throw you around as I feel that is sort of the point. However with steel coasters I want a smooth ride. I despise rita for many reasons but a big factor is how rough it is. I suspect I will think the same of Baco.
I meant bad ride as in few ride it, costs a lot to run and has low satisfaction. My personal opinion of it is far less than bad.
Alton want to minimise costs. So reducing the hours of NST is the obvious choice. To minimise the amount of people this disappoints you would close it at the hours where fewest ride it. The morning and an hour before park close.
Very few, if any head to NST in the last hour. Staggered openings on it is almost guaranteed and I would be surprised if it opened 7 days a week. It's a bad ride, no one rides it so closing it will have pretty much no impact to everyone's day.
I suspect it will open at 12 and close an hour before the rest of the park. Doubt it will be open on weekdays as well. Too costly for an attraction very few people use.
A rival in Blackpool would kill them both. Blackpool as a whole is in decline and having something take away more business from them would be disastrous. I'm with BPB on this one. A rival would damage the town in the long run.
The plans show fire escapes where one has a staircase and he rest don't. It strongly suggests 2 floors. However there few lateral beams in the building to support a floor.
£3m on the building, £5-15m on advertising. Remaining on theming and ride hardware. Now this is very likely to be screen based so that will take a large budget on animation/filming. So with all that the ride hardware comes to £10-20m. Now they are all rough estimates so I could be out by quite a lot. However an AGV for £30m would be a discount price.
Another point to consider is AGVs struggle with elevation change. This is over 2 floors.
AGV rides already exist. Also I did suggest this idea months ago. The problem with AGVs is that they are very expensive. The cost is coming down but the budget may not stretch that far.
They want to encourage more people through the door at a time of low demand so they can get more money. Basic supply and demand stuff thorpe are following. Doubt there will be other reasons for the price drop.
I think the no queue thing was referring to RnR which looks like in the mean time it has been scrapped. It could also mean a ride with a high throughput. I don't think its a statement which should be read too much into.
Just because a company has made good music up until now there can always be exceptions. However if its anything like Helix launch platform I will be happy.
Knowing a ride is going to be closed the day before when it was working "fine" implies that stealths current downtime is planned. However just because it's planned doesn't mean it's avoidable. It's down for a reason but seeing as we don't know that reason it's stupid to make any sort of complaint about it.
I do not think Thorpe would take note of low numbers in the last week and blame it on stealth. The downtime of stealth does seem odd and planned. It is a poor decision but I think emailing would get the point across more than not turning up.