I finally got around to riding the post-furb Space Mountain this past weekend. It was pretty much as I expected, based on the detailed reviews and photos that people have posted to this thread since it soft opened weeks ago.
Still needs improvement:
- Cleanliness of the outside -- it's filthy.
- Silent lift hills! The clanking is incredibly loud and distracting (including the clanking on the lift hills that bring the empty vehicles back to the loading level).
- I don't mind the location of the onboard photo, but couldn't they have done something to the wall behind the vehicles? In the photo, it shows up as a plain black wall with seams and rivets, which makes the photo look like you're in some kind of dark ride and not flying through space. Just having some sort of appropriate space decoration on the wall would solve the problem.
- The red lights from the cameras toward the end of the ride. Either change the placement, or do something so that they're not quite so obvious and distracting.
- Also, please shake a leg and finish the green-screen camera thing at the end of the exit queue. Without it, the bright lime green wall comes off as aesthetically loud, irritating, and pointless.
Not bad:
- The queue games were fine. I don't think they were absolutely necessary (and I did see them disrupting the flow of the queue at times), but they're unique and do help tie the theming of the attraction together -- especially with the references to the game tasks that appear again in the post-show.
- I miss having the ability to see the coaster and shooting star effects while in the queue, but I like the space station scenes projected in the queue ceiling.
- The ride could have been darker overall, but I'm fine with what they ended up with. There are parts of the track that are virtually pitch black, and other parts where you can see almost everything for short periods of time. It mostly depends on where in the layout you are, and where you're facing relative to the illuminated lift hills, which give off a fair amount of light. Still, the layout is disorienting enough that, for the most part, you can't tell where you're going -- which should suffice, unless you've committed the layout to memory (in which case having the ride be pitch-black isn't going to make a difference anyway).
Great:
- The post-show scenes. Not that elaborate, but nice and appropriate -- particularly the "Constellations" future city.
- Keeping the red re-entry tunnel. Along with the sound effect, the tightness of the tunnel perfectly suggests a turbulent, fiery return that the generic flashing lights in DL and HKDL don't.
- I didn't find the new track any "smoother" at all, whether in the front or the back of the rockets -- which was definitely a good thing. You still have the same visceral feeling of racing through space, out of control, that the bland, DL-type layout lacks.
- No onboard audio. The ultimate decision to not put audio in the vehicles was the correct one, whether it was reached for the right reason (the realization that SM doesn't need this gimmick, which adds nothing to the theming) or the wrong reason (general TDO cheapness that manifests itself everywhere else throughout WDW).
