Busch Gardens Tampa announces Cobra's Curse roller coaster

Good lord, who does those videos? Thank you for the dramatic story line, and thanks again for the 10 seconds of actual ride...

The press release links to only two images, but one shows the car heading into a giant cobras mouth and it looks like an outward banked turn behind the teeth. Now, that's cool.
It also shows cars with 2 seats in line, not 4 riders back to back or facing each other like we usually see. Heavy riders in the back seat, please...

Looks like it's an Intamin. I thought they would've learned not to go with Intamin after Falcon's Fury. But it took Cedar Fair several installations to learn that lesson.

It's a Mack.

It's a Mack spinner (think Sierra Sidewinder at Knott's). They feature 2x2 seating, facing forwards or backwards going up the lift...

http://rcdb.com/12781.htm

edit: No shame in being beaten to the post by the site webmaster, LOL...but note the pic linked shows the train passing by the cobra's mouth as opposed to into/through it...

edit 2: 1,000 PPH on a ride with an elevator lift and a four-person car seems....ambitious.

The track looks similar to Intamin's style of track, which is why I thought it was Intamin.

Hooray!

There's a Scooby Doo themed Mack custom mouse somewhere (Australia?) that has a vertical lift. It takes two individual cars up at once then time-releases them. Maybe this will be similar.

And I would say from the renderings the seats in each car look to be facing the same direction, not back to back.

rollergator said:

edit 2: 1,000 PPH on a ride with an elevator lift and a four-person car seems....ambitious.

They're coupled cars though, right? 8 riders per vehicle.

125 dispatches an hour. Once every 30 seconds? Mack? No problem!

I think I found a layout guys! Looks like it's a dueling El Loco of some sort. Check out those outward banked curves and beyond vertical drops! Capacity looks bad though ;)

Rick_UK said:

125 dispatches an hour. Once every 30 seconds? Mack? No problem!

This is the same park that manages to stack Montu on virtually every dispatch...Gwazi's crews were so bad that closing the ride might have actually *increased* overall ride capacity.

Yeah, the company needs to start over with operations. It desperately needs new blood. There is zero emphasis on capacity.

Apologies, I thought you were doubting the ability of the ride. Absolutely, it will be down to the crew and their efforts.

I generally don't understand capacity estimates. I've never seen a ride come close to the official estimate unless they're not loading human beings. Or is that the point? Like, I think Deja Vu was listed at 800 pph which comes to 1 train every 2 minutes. I think the ride time itself was around 2 minutes, let alone unload, load, and check.

^At SFGAm's Deja Vu, there was a sign in the operators' booth - "target" capacity was 432pph.

Yeah, but I seem to recall the media info. was around 800. A quick google search of "Raptor coaster capacity" spat out the following numbers:

Raptor - 1600 (50 trains an hour)

MF - 1600 (44 trains an hour)

Maverick - 1200 (50 loads an hour)

Rougarou - 1800(!) (56 trains an hour)

IIRC, B&M's routinely list 1600 or so. Either they're not measuring what we think they're measuring (capacity if the coaster isn't actually unloaded and reloaded) or they are completely out of touch with reality.

I hope this is on the fun level as Euro-Mir. That was a fantastic ride.

About Busch Gardens and capacity on new rides, The Williamsburg park said in an interview that Tempesto will get about 600 riders per hour. For a park as popular as Busch Gardens, that's insane.

At least Sea World is going with a B&M next year.

Capacity is important to me.

ApolloAndy said:

Yeah, but I seem to recall the media info. was around 800. A quick google search of "Raptor coaster capacity" spat out the following numbers:

Raptor - 1800 (50 trains an hour)

MF - 1600 (44 trains an hour)

Maverick - 1200 (50 loads an hour)

Rougarou - 1800(!) (56 trains an hour)

IIRC, B&M's routinely list 1600 or so. Either they're not measuring what we think they're measuring (capacity if the coaster isn't actually unloaded and reloaded) or they are completely out of touch with reality.

I think it might be based on the longest actual time constraint during ride operation. That is, the longest amount of ride duration between block sections (either first drop to brakerun, or some combination of mid course brake) and assume that the station can load quickly enough to not stack trains. The reason I'm thinking this is because you can't actually change this particular piece of time at all once the ride is in motion, therefore it becomes a time constraint. Whereas the loading/unloading is variable, and will either match the capacity, or be less than.

So Re: Deja Vu, perhaps that the theoretical capacity based on actual run time assuming no load time?
Re: other rides, that's assuming that the load/unload time will match the largest block section

Full disclosure, this is just brainstorming and I don't actually know

There’s certainly a tendency to post the maximum theoretical throughput, rather than the likely throughput. I think with the B&Ms posting 1500+, that’s achievable with a good crew and a helpful ride system (Inverted or anything with a floor…). Flyers and stand ups take longer and I think Floorless rides seem to take a little longer, for whatever reason.

I’ve been in meetings where parks feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place in terms of capacity, so many problems with capacity are caused by the public. Even with the best intentions, you can’t force people into a train, get their harness on etc any quicker than they want to and to push them doesn’t make for a great experience for the guest.

Some of the best things you can do to aid capacity harm the guest experience or your ability to profit. Some Ops departments don’t like the fact that Games departments give out crazy big prizes because they’re a pig to store in cramped stations. If you provide lockers, guests don’t want to put their iPads and the like in a locker. If you provide a baggage claim system, that gets expensive to staff over the course of a season with very little return – so to balance the hourly staffing cost of the ride, you end up having to take staff off the loading platform and put them behind the baggage desk, which negates the need for the baggage desk because you can’t load the trains quick enough because you don’t have enough staff on the loading platform.

Nemesis is quoted as moving 1400 people an hour and that’s achieved on most days – it’s possible to exceed it, too. Oblivion can do 1800, it’s not done that for a while and probably has no requirement to do so.

All good fun.

I think lockers do help a lot. While buying a locker every time I ride Fury to say the least is a hassle, it improves capacity greatly because now you don't have a bunch of people crowded around bins. Since the ride has to get to a certain point before the next one can go on the lift, many times, the train will pull out of the station, wait on a section of track between the station and lift, and the third train can already start loading. The operations on that ride are insane.