Silver Dollar City - Thursday, July 4, 2013

Tyler, that's actually a very interesting system. I can see your logic. But I must ask, why 136?

To make it simple, I chose to have my intervals be pi divided by 4 or, in degrees, 45 degrees. I skipped the first 45 because it wasn't needed.

Now, to your question in specific: 135 is halfway between 90 and 180, so I thought more than 135 should be an inversion. Therefore, Millenium Force's first overbank of 122 degrees is in fact an overbank. Outlaw Run's first element after the drop is 151 degrees and is an inversion. I actually thought up this system awhile ago and finally found an appropriate time to use it.

For what it's worth despite putting inversion in quotes earlier, I definitely felt flipped on Outlaw's first turn. Whereas I definitely don't on Millennium's first turn. Touché, Tyler.

I have to laugh a bit to myself, because Tyler uses the exact same interval system I use with the exact same logic I use. Kudos, sir.

Yeah. I don't count the first curve on M-force as an inversion. Nor would I count the inclined loop on Mantis as an inversion, though it is pretty close.

Though Tyler's inversion math was a little over my head. Though I would say a 45 degree curve is banked, a 90 degree curve is high banked, and a 135 is over banked. 180 would be considered inverted. But, what do you call it between 180 and 360? As if there is a need to give those positions a name.

I would hope that the wooden coasters with inversions, will continue to be rider friendly. Sounds like this is a very nice park. But, doubt I will ever be able to afford to go there. Sure sounds like fun.

Has any coaster ever gone around 270 degrees and then back? Looks like RMC has something else to aim for.

270* is the same banking as 90*, it's just banked on a different side. If you've taken Algebra 2, Trig, or Precalc, you would understand if I gave you a simple sine wave in degrees instead of radians.

360 and 0 are equal, 90 and 270 are equal, but on opposite sides. In fact, 0 is equal to 720, 1080, etc. You see? Some people aren't understanding this. Maybe a unit circle will help. Flip the circle so that 0/360 is on the bottom to make it look as if it were a roller coaster's banking and it should be clear to you.

Edit: You might have to get a magnifying glass or zoom in on your computer to see the numbers. Or, you could go here.

While, I agree entirely with what you're saying, Tyler, I think blasterboy is thinking something a little different.

Imagine sitting in a coaster. You head is at the 12 o'clock position. If the track banks 90 degrees to the left your head is at 9 o'clock. If it banks another 90 degrees counter-clockwise your head is at 6 o'clock and you've done 180.

Now imagine it keeps going another 90 degrees. Your head is at 3 o'clock and you've gone 270.

It's not quite the same as going 90 to the right even though in both cases your head is in the 3 o'clock position. How you got there makes the difference.

Imagine going 270 degrees (3/4ths of a full rotation) and then coming back that full 270 to return to upright rather than just finishing the roll by continuing the last 90.

That's what blasterboy was suggesting.

Yeah, I understand. I wasn't refering to blasterboy, but I was speaking towards TimberRider.

I forgot to mention this, but the two equal bankings would be -90 and 270 now that I think about it. To get to 270, you can either go 270 degrees counter clockwise or 90 degrees clockwise. Something that goes 270 is an inversion that ends with -90 banking.

I think what messes people up is the fact that we're dealing with circles here. Mathematically speaking, the number of degrees can go on forever. But in terms of position, a point on a circle changes position in cycles of 360 or in other words,nab n degree relativity between two objects is the same as n-360a degrees a is the highest multiple of 360 that can be subtracted from n without going into negatives.

In terms of actually going upside down, the trick here is probably to divide, because when you're riding a coaster, position isn't what matters, it's how many times you were upside down. The traditional definition of upside down is probably 180 degrees down from a center point. To get to 180 degrees, you would rotate 180 degrees to that position and 180 degrees back, a total of 360. So to see how many times you were upside down, you could do n/360 where n is the number of degrees something is rotated around a fixed point.

The key aspect of this would be to understand the difference between position and movement since although, 1080 degrees around a fixed point is the same as 360 degrees around the point, there's a big difference between going upside down once and going upside down twice.

That was longer than I thought it would take to write this up.