All things Magic Mountain

[D.Silentu]

The backwards launch sounds so much less scary for me. If I can see the station/ground, I'm far more secure feeling. It is when I shoot up to a blank sky without any reference points where I get freaked out.

I like your description here. Having experienced it both ways, that’s exactly how it felt. Advantages in each direction.

 

[PiratesMansion]

That’s too bad. I’m not a huge coaster/ thrill ride enthusiast but it’s a pretty unique ride no?

One of only two rides of its type built, yes. The other one was at Dream World in Australia, which also had the built-in drop tower a long time before Magic Mountain did (ironically, the Australian ride was called...Tower of Terror).

I don’t mind them getting rid of Viper. Oh I remember Flashback. Rode it once or twice and hated it. Killed your neck.

Although I never got to ride Flashback, for whatever reason it always fascinated me in the Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 Magic Mountain scenario. It was only later that I found that it actually started at MY Six Flags park (Great America), where it had been called Z-Force. Although I've never heard anything positive about the ride experience, it's sort of a prototypical ride in that it indirectly led to all sorts of influential rides that came later-Batman, Goliath, Riddler, etc.

Wow. Ummm how on earth was the ride able to start?

The seatbelt on Riddler is a secondary restraint, a back-up in the unlikely event the primary restraint fails.

In addition, for most of the industry it is a relatively recent feature for a roller coaster computer system to insist on a coaster restraint be fastened to a particular place before the ride dispatched. This is a result of a few things: 1) changing ideas about coaster restraints over the last few decades, in concert with 2) the push for more extreme airtime requiring stricter, tighter restraints for rider safety. For much of roller coaster history, gravity worked sufficiently enough as a primary restraint-the lap bars/shoulder bars were actually secondary restraints much of the time. Why? Because even on attractions that heavily featured airtime/negative g forces in the past, the forces were not extreme enough to put the rider in any real danger of flying out unless they straight up were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing, like standing up. You could ride virtually any coaster built before 1992 or so without any restraint actively engaged and lived to tell the tale, assuming you didn't do anything stupid or there wasn't a random ride fault when you happened to be riding. Into the early 2000's, you used to be able to go on certain Coaster Nerd sites and find pictures of coaster enthusiasts riding coasters with restraints that were very clearly not fully engaged or closed around the rider, if they were even closed at all.

This didn't change until the mid-90s when new companies like Intamin and now RMC were coming into the coaster market in full force, using newly developed computer technology to put new emphasis on extreme negative-g forces on many of their designs, making it possible to build rides that took extreme thrills to the next level. Suddenly those restraints became primary, and before the industry fully adjusted to this new reality, a few people flew out of those rides to their deaths as a result of the unfortunate combination strong negative-g forces, inadequate restraints, and rider size (two of the three Superman: Ride of Steel coasters built by Six Flags in 99/2000 have done this, as has the RMC-designed New Texas Giant). Hence, since then on average there have been more restrictive restraints, harnesses needing to go down to a certain threshold to be allowed to dispatch, the increased use of seatbelts on everything, and so on.

That makes me feel better.

Does the seatbelt on Silver Bullet at Knotts do anything? Since I'm tall, I have this worry that the shoulder restraint is still unlocked and the seatbelt is the only thing holding me in.

It's a redundancy to keep you safely seated in the event your harness fails. It's also used as the visual go/no go indicator on B&M rides (Silver Bullet, Batman, Riddler, etc). Can't fasten the belt? You can't ride.