Hydraulic Launch Coaster Safety

Red Force is also running 12 passenger trains so you're looking at 60% of the power demands, even if the final velocity were the same.

I remember Cedar Point people talking about why they went hydraulic on Dragster somewhere, but I can't remember where it was. I think it was a TV special, but it could have been at Coastermania Q&A. They said that had they gone the electric route, it would have taken a much longer launch section, and they didn't have the space to fit it all in.

I think they also addressed the power issue. Using an electric motor would have taken too much power to launch the trains. With the hydraulic launch, the ride uses a smaller power draw, but for a longer time as it compresses the air / fluid. Maybe they could have gone with a flywheel power storage, but I believe at the time Hulk was the only coaster to use a flywheel storage, and even then the launch only goes up to 40MPH, far from the 120 needed.

Don't a handful of the old Schwartzkoph launched loopers use a flywheel? And the Phoenix does as well, oddly enough.

I think that's a case of using stored mechanical energy and then using it as... mechanical energy. In the case of something like Thunderbird, the mechanical energy is converted to electricity to launch the train with linear motors.

I actually saved a link to the article where Monty Jasper talked about using linear motors on Dragster. Here's the quote:

"Linear motors would have been energy efficient and required little maintenance, but they wouldn't have been able to accelerate Top Thrill Dragster to 120 mph in four seconds," explains Jasper. "They would have required a longer approach to the hill, and had we gone that route, we would've had to remove or relocate two nearby attractions. Plus, riders would have been denied the excitement of such high acceleration."

Link to Article

I've always wondered what the "two nearby attractions" were. I kinda assume one of them would have been Gemini.

Well Red Force uses LIMS and is 53 feet shorter in height but 87 feet longer in track length. I don't feel like doing math, buzzers, so have at it!

I don't know much about the minutiae of LSM technology, but I'd like to believe that it's a cost consideration rather than a technical limitation for launching trains faster over shorter distances. Heck -- Red Force has one line of LSMs; what could stop them from having two sets in parallel?

Maybe this is a RideMan question, but is a hydraulic system significantly more energy efficient than a magnetic system, or is it a matter of the hydraulic system being easier to store potential energy?

All you have to do is look at "Supreman the Escape From Krypton" at Magic Mountain. It was built with parallel tracks, and it's own dedicated substation. The only ran both sides for a short while, it had a lot of teething problems the first year or so. It would regularly pull more current than the substation was intended to provide, not to mention the cost of he electricity vs it's rph. The sop became one side operation only, and eventually the park attached a drop ride to it's support tower.

That was also built 20 years ago. Technology has advanced significantly since then.

And it only launches you 328' high at 100mph.