When Will Dinosaur Turn Back to Countdown to Extinction?

[AndyMagic]

Favorite Ride!

Ok, CTX/DINOSAUR is one of my favorites and I have ridden it over 40 times. Of course I feel CTX was a much better ride! I still love DINOSAUR but I just don't think that toning down the jerkiness of the ride would make it less intense for young kids. The kids are going to be scared of the effects, the volume, and the dinosaurs not the bumpiness of the ride. Although they did change the height requirement so I guess they gained something from toning it down. The part where it is REALLY noticable for me is when Seeker is trying to navigate and he is screaming "LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT" I remember feeling like I was going to fall off the rover when that part came and it was without a doubt the best part of the ride. Now it feels like I'm in my grandmother's sedan! That is really the only part that bugs me. Also, maybe the DINOSAUR expert who recently signed on the board can answer this question. Why must the ride just sit there in the dark for like 10 seconds if a dinosaur is in rehab? It really just ruins the pacing of the ride. Is it really hard to have the rovers skip over the temporary missing dinos? I remember two years ago when the first dino that eats the smaller one was in rehab the rover just sat there quietly and everyone thought the ride was broken.

 

[mbro2002]

Andy,

I think the pause you speak of was completely unrelated to a Dino being out for rehab. At the point where you pass the alioramus (the one eating the smaller one), there is no programmed stop at all. Normally, the vehicle continues moving right past it. So, if you stopped for several seconds, I would guess that, for some reason, a vehicle somewhere ahead of you got delayed. It is pretty unlikely that you would experience the effects of a station delay at that point in the ride, but there are all sorts of reasons that a car could get delayed for a few seconds in the ride. Traction problems, picking up a bad track sensor reading, too many fat people on board....

Anyway, the vehicle behind the delayed one gets too close and stops, the one behind it gets too close and stops, and so on. These are called Zone Intrusions and basically freeze the forward motion of the vehicle until the zone ahead of it is clear. Once the first vehicles gets moving, every vehicle behind it has to wait, in sequence, for the track ahead of them to clear up, which makes the ride very safe, but has the effect of increasing the amount of time that the vehicles are stopped. If there were two or three stopped vehicles in front of you, this could turn a two second pause in the front vehicle into a ten second pause in yours. Of course, I can never be sure exactly what happened, but that is a very educated guess.

To answer your quesiton, it WOULD be VERY difficult to change any component of the vehicles' motion along the track. At peak capacity, there are 14 vehicles on the track, with a dispatch interval of 18.5 seconds. The entire ride is designed around this fact. If the interval between vehicles is less than 17 seconds at any point on the track, two things will result:
#1: The second vehicle will be running into the protection zone of the previous vehicles throughout the ride, causing Zone Intrusions and resulting in a stop and go ride.
#2: The show scenes won't be able to reset themselves in time and, at some points, you'd be able to see the car in front of you.

The whole ride and all it's programming are designed to keep the vehicles 18.5 seconds apart. If you try to change anything, the whole ride would fall apart with Zone Intrusions everywhere, backing everything up. In short, the ride is a very large balancing act, with all the vehicles moving out of each other's way at exactly the needed time.

To further complicate things, Dinosaur has a bit of a design flaw that never showed up in computer testing or the testing during the soft opening.

The CTX track is a clone of the DL Indy track, with the exception of being about 50 feet shorter. There is one small strip of track which was not included for show reasons. They thought they could get away with this by dropping one car from the track (Indy runs 15 peak), but they still cut it a bit short. The most noticeable result is that cars are a bit too likely to get backed up from the station and stop in the 2nd time tunnel. This can make Dinosaur an even bigger balancing act during peak times, where a delay on the station can back the ride up all the way to the charging Carno (or further) in a hurry. That gives you an idea of how close the vehicles run to each other, so you can see that their precise timing is critical.

 

[STGRhost]

mbro2002, thank you! That was GREAT information! I love hearing about that kind of stuff...Somepeople might think hearing about timing and capacity boring, but it fascinates me. Anyway, thanks...

 

[mbro2002]

STGRhost,

Thanks for your reply - this is the kind of stuff that fascinates me, too. If anyone else is interested in this, maybe we can get a separate post going; there is plenty more to be told.

Matt

 

[AndyMagic]

I find it interesting as well. I never noticed how close together the Rovers run and having 14 on the track at once is pretty amazing! Do you happen to know the capacity of the ride? I would guess it is about 1800 people per hour.

 

[mbro2002]

The theoretical capacity is right around 1800; however, 1200-1300 seemed to be the long-term average. Seats left empty and seat-belt delay reduce the capacity.

Matt

 

[RobFL]

I doubt 1800 an hour. That's near the holy grail numbers that even Epcot's massive omnimovers had trouble reaching.

-Rob

 

[AndyMagic]

Originally posted by RobFL
I doubt 1800 an hour. That's near the holy grail numbers that even Epcot's massive omnimovers had trouble reaching.

-Rob

I wouldn't say that! The Great Movie Ride has a capacity of about 2400 people and I believe rides like The Haunted Mansion and POTC also pass 2000.

 

[mbro2002]

Sorry, but I was a little vague in my previous post about ride capacity. The THEORETICAL capacity is actually 2,335pph. That's easy to determine with a little math:

60 sec/min * 60 min/hour = 3600 seconds per hour

3600 sec/hour / 18.5 sec/dispatch = 193 dispatches per hour

193 disp/hour * 12 seats/car = 2335 people per hour

Of course, that won't ever happen without a standby line and people with a better understanding of how to use seatbelts. The OPERATIONAL ride capacity, however, IS listed at 1,800pph. That is the number Industrial Engineering came up with after studying the flow of people through the ride, basically meaning that under normal circumstance, Dinosaur should be putting through 1,800 people per hour.

As I said, in my time there, we hardly ever ran at this rate, usually hitting between 1,200 and 1,400pph. Some people are slower than others at the critical station positions (Grouper and Belt Check) and they bring down the ride. Both positions require lots of experience and don't come easily. Remember, the difference between putting 11 people on a car and 12 people in that car is nearly 200pph.

Matt

 

[TravisMT81]

Pirates- 3,600 per hr.

Spaceship Earth- 2,400 per hr.

Space mountain- 2057-2500 if both sides open.

MAELSTROM - 1,920 per hr.

Living with the Land- 2,736 per hr

this is of course if the rides are loaded right..and you don;t get a slow . :lol:

 

[THE Monorail Lime]

Hey, it’s 2021 and it’s still dinosaur..

 

[The Mom]

Hey, it’s 2021 and it’s still dinosaur..

6. Do not bump threads unless you have something else to add to the discussion. Additionally, replying to discussions which have been inactive for several months or longer should be avoided unless you have something of value to add.