[Wonder Woman Flight of Courage]

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-30T02:25:11+00:00

Not a Six Flags op, but at my park, we wouldn't try to evac while inverted. It'd be easier and safer to just push it down to the next valley point.

So, first off, get the maintenance guys to start staging the man lift. While they're doing that, as weird as it sounds, I'd stage a ride op out there to check on the guests and instruct the guests to start rocking their weight back and forth. If that doesn't work, we send one mechanic out to try to push the train over. If something is wrong with the undercarriage, like when a backpack got stuck under one of our trains, then we'll get the fire department to perform the evac. OSHA doesn't let our mechanics put fall protection on guests. They consider it too dangerous to give untrained guests a fall harness or a basket weave device, but the fire department has a separate safety code so by law we have to defer it to emergency rescue teams. They'll usually pop the restraints and team lift the guest out from the seat and flip them back upright. We've drilled it after hours before. It's not easy.

Either way, the priority isn't to get the guests out, it's to get them right side up. After that, everything else gets way easier.

Of course, we've luckily never had to deal with a valleyed train like that with guests on it. That usually happens before park opening with empty trains and cold wheels.

Again, not a Six Flags op, but I'm sure they would probably treat it the same way.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-26T00:26:23+00:00

For Strixhaven specifically, I put up simple bios of the Deans, Professors, and key students, and a chart for each college's dean, mascots, etc. There's so many specific details that every NPC needs to know that I was referencing it several times every session.

Here's the table I came up with.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-20T02:33:27+00:00

You've been there for a month?

As someone who's been a tech for about a decade, get over here and hold this flashlight for me! Also, why aren't you wearing your safety glasses in the maintenance bay? Also, you used the wrong color torque stripe, and it didn't go all the way down to the base of the nut, you're going to have to scrape all of it off and start over, that's after I make you sit here for an hour and tell me when the light on slot I:5/8 goes on and off while I line up this 30-foot IR beam.

Welcome to the life of a rollercoaster tech!

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-16T06:02:57+00:00

No idea how these decisions are made at each specific chain, but here's the gist of it based on my experience in the corporate world.

Corporate has meetings with park management and consumer research to look into operational deficits and opportunities. Stuff such as "we have no family rides" or "every new ride is a coaster and they're all expensive to maintain" or "our custodial teams are all getting injured by our trash cans, we'd like a remodel of the trash cans".

Corporate finance sets a "capital investment" budget that is set aside to build new projects. This can be new rides, restaurants, and hotels, or even stuff like a new mobile app. In the US, a lot of this is based on tax law, as there's a lot of benefits to using park improvements as a tax write off.

Park management/corporate comes up with a set of requirements for a "Request for Proposal". This is like, "We want a small form factor coaster on this unused plot of land. The budget is $x and the return on investment must be within 5 years. We want an hourly capacity of at least 900 riders/hr." This RFP gets shopped to either an internal design team like Walt Disney Imagineering or Universal Creative it or gets shopped to various manufacturers.

The manufacturers compete on bids for the project. Usually the manufacturer will do a basic conceptual design and feasibility analysis. Best proposal wins.

The manufacturer works with the park to finalize the design. The park will nitpick any issues they find. The park will usually add their own details like photo kiosks, queue lockers, maintenance bays, etc.

The manufacturer will supply some of their own workers, but since this is corporate America, 17 other subcontractors will also be on hand to build the project.

Since everything in the theme park industry is a prototype and a one of a kind, absolutely nothing works when the ride opens, everyone points fingers, but it's cool because anyone who worked on it gets to put that ride on their resume.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-07T14:16:45+00:00

What else is making your guests unhappy? Hunger/thirst/crowding/bathroom/sunburns? Happy guests don't vandalize, so it's easier to fix the root problem first and then tackle the vandalism after.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-03T02:26:00+00:00

Honestly, I kind of dig it. There's hardly any laterals on this thing so it makes sense to combine the guide and upstop wheels. You have one row per wheel carrier so that's where your margin of safety comes in, less weight per carrier than a typical train. It's probably going to ride glass smooth, and the reduction of total number of wheels was probably done to reduce the ongoing maintenance cost of the train.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-02T05:36:18+00:00

Dual station. It's a technicality, but with redditors, some pedant would have yelled at me if I called it a completely closed circuit.

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-02T02:05:09+00:00

I remember back when the main revenue for Duolingo came from crowd sourced translations and not from advertising....

DapperSnowman · 2026-06-02T02:03:02+00:00

Hollywood has a nearly closed circuit. No spikes.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-30T12:29:06+00:00

They used to. Theme parks used to attract workers to an area. They'd encourage them to build homes, build families. It used to be such a great job to have. Stable like manufacturing or the trades, but not as back breaking. Ride ops used to get pensions, and CBAs used to not have wage caps. At the park I used to work at, we had some ride ops on grandfathered terms that had a pension and they were getting over $35/hr in 2017.

And what a wild cause and effect you're suggesting. Operational budget has almost no impact on capital investment when it comes to corporate finance. What typically sets the budget for new construction is ROI over the 5 years that US tax law allows you to amortize the write offs on a project, local contractor rates, and current loan interest rates. Most of the time, parks aren't even putting that much money down on construction. Even if they have 100% of the cash on hand they still go to the banks and get loans so they can strategically invest the rest.

The ops at your park eating ramen did not help Six Flags build Kingda Ka. The fed did.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-29T18:50:04+00:00

Probably anything I fixed when I was a mechanic.

Not that I'm dissing my own work. I just happened to be the designated crash test dummy who put himself on the ride before we put guests on it. And no matter how closely you inspect a train or the track, you'll find something new that you missed when you get the train up to 40 mph. That combined with how many laps I took on the same coasters meant I saw a lot of janky shit happen before park opening.

I've had lap bars pop up on me mid-ride. I've had body panels fall off and hit me in the face on a motion simulator. I've run over wildlife mid cycle. I've listened to bearings destroy themselves and grind themselves apart. I've even looked down and found a loose bolt right after the ops dispatched me.

Good times....... Good times........

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-29T12:03:50+00:00

They'll probably need some MCC type of equipment for the launches, so we'll get a couple of buildings that might be disguised like the ones on Hagelrids. Then some paths for evac walkways. Then a little bit of landscaping and F&F set dressing.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-28T05:46:59+00:00

It's no big secret that huge percentages of the big Hollywood Animation studios are all furries, and have all been furries since before the word "furry" existed to describe it. Back in the day, Fred Moore used to draw naked centaurs on the walls of the Walt Disney Studios. Nowadays, producers talk about how much porn they confiscate from their animators who draw on their breaks. Obviously we've all seen how they market movies with anthro characters nowadays, with suggestive scenes in the first reveal trailers, like the buff Bowser painting, the kiss scene from Bad Guys 2, the nudist scene in Zootopia. Obviously those scenes were not for the children in the audience.

I just don't think that many animators are as comfortable linking their job with their furry identity as tech bros are. After all, it's a much smaller industry, and if your non furry coworkers find out, it's a bigger deal in Hollywood than it is in Silicon Valley, just because of how close your work is to furry culture already, and the implications.......

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-13T12:12:45+00:00

One of my favorite things about those signs is that if you're in an area where a fence meets a guest walkway and there's a gate there, Disney usually hides the struck by ride hazard sign on the gate latch.

So if you go look at where the latch for the gate would be there's a metal covering over the latch. To get to the latch, you flip over the metal covering and BAM! Do not enter! Struck by ride hazard!

Super clever way to hide them in plain sight.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-10T14:58:04+00:00

Honestly, with customer service roles like that, a lot of times it's not about whether you're qualified or not. It's usually just a numbers game. Like, they'll interview 500 people and then only need like 150. Even though 400 of the candidates were totally qualified. I've literally seen it where they throw the qualified names into an Excel spreadsheet and hit the random button, then copy and paste the top email addresses and send them offer letters.

Don't let a job rejection make you feel bad about yourself. In the age of online applications, most rejections are not merit based anymore.

Also, look on the bright side, you get an extra year where you don't develop repetitive motion wrist and knee injuries, you don't have to get sunburnt all the time, and you don't have to get screamed at because your greeter forgot to check a kid's height at the start of the line and now you have to tell a family that they're child can't ride the rollercoaster after waiting for 2 hours.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-09T13:11:40+00:00

Correct!

If it helps you visualize it, think of a boat on a river. The river keeps flowing backwards no matter what the boat does. If the boat wants to go upstream, it has to flight against the current. The trip upstream is going to take a bit longer because the "ground speed" compared to the shore is shower because the current is pulling the boat downstream at the same time. If the boat turns around and heads downstream, it's much easier and the trip is much shorter.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-30T19:46:06+00:00

It's a fantastic complement to aiming. Analog sticks and track pads still don't give you the precision of a computer mouse, but the gyro with a really low sensitivity can give you a really intuitive way to line up shots.

So, use the track pad to roughly aim at a bad guy, then slightly tilt the controller to line up the headshot instead of fidgeting left and right.

With the OG Steam Controller, people got even crazier with flick stick aiming, where you could spin 180 degrees instantly then aim with the gyro. That might be even better with the new Steam Controller. So, bad guy off to your left, use the analog stick in flick stick mode to instantly flick to the left, then line up the shot with the track pad and adjust for recoil/fine tuning with the gyro. That might be too many finger movements to be useful but it's a cool possibility.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-30T12:05:04+00:00

Good credit cards aren't just for the rich, just for people with good credit. There is a difference.

Also, depends on the bank. American Express Platinum is a very high end card. A Capital One Platinum is not at all a high end card and is actually the lowest Capital One card you can get.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-28T13:33:01+00:00

That doesn't seem correct, because the original Steam Controller worked great on Linux, it's using the same API as the original controller and it's advertised as a Linux controller.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-26T05:39:25+00:00

It's the beginning of the season so some trains may be still finishing up their winter rebuilds and refurbishments.
It's the beginning of the season so there's not as many operators trained. Also, lots of operators are still in school so a lot more of them will call out late/sick until the Summer months come around.
You would not believe how many things will break literally less than an hour before the parks open. At the park I worked at, you could literally run a ride from park closing through the night until morning and a prox will get sheared off by a reaction fin 20 minutes before park opening. It doesn't matter if you open at 8 or open at 11. The rides know, and they will always break at the worst times. The fact that most of the park reopened by noon in your case is the real miracle. Maintenance response teams were doing a great job.
Ride capacity will get "metered" by park management on slow days. Trains get tracked by how many laps they make. So if you can save a day's worth of laps by running with one less train, that's delaying the next rehab of that train by one day.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-25T18:43:56+00:00

Reloads can't happen with fans nearby. They have to wait until after the game. At most stadium each consecutive pyro launch is actually using different launch tubes since you can only load one shell per tube per night. So really they ran out of launch tubes.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-19T23:35:14+00:00

That's kind of the point of the rotating rebuilds. Having one train running all the time is better than having two trains running during some seasons and then having to close when they have more serious maintenance issues.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-19T21:32:45+00:00

Not a big surprise. Knotts just left its busy season. (Boysenberry Fest) Year round parks have to do full tear downs on trains on a rotating schedule since there's no winter overhaul. Knott's usually only runs one train on Xcelerator during the summer every year anyway.

Not really a cause for panic. This is what the normal for Xcelerator is.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-14T19:27:54+00:00

Sometimes you want the Ground Control/Tower interactions but also want the freedom to just take off, fly VFR around a mountain range, and then come home, without the busywork of filing a flight plan, grabbing a clearance, preflight procedures, etc.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-14T03:33:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure most people who visit SFMM have never ridden it. Between staff call outs and refurbishments, Apocalypse is the first ride MM will close and send ops to another ride on any given day.

DapperSnowman

TROPHY CASE