Its going to take the record for tallest and fastest in the UK and its Thorpe’s first coaster since The Swarm in 2012, so its pretty exciting for us here in the UK. Hopefully, it’ll have plenty of airtime, which is something we’re sorely lacking right now! Also, I think much of the general public over here won’t have experienced airtime and inversions with lapbars before so it should be quite novel.

Quite a few people have complained about the short duration, but I’m hoping it’ll be a Nemesis-esque coaster which hits the brakes with lots of speed and leaves you wanting more, rather than petering out and overstaying it’s welcome.

Update: Looks like that aforementioned family coaster probably isn’t going to Towers after all… I can’t imagine this will be SW9 https://twitter.com/RockyMtnConst/status/1692582198623576414

The Lemmy documentation explains the different sort options pretty well: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

The difference between “Hot” and “Active” is probably the most confusing to most users.

And I’m sure Google definitely wouldn’t require your copy of Chrome to be free of any Ad-Blocking or Anti-Tracking extensions to get that “Human” flag /s

DLR trains have never been designed to be un-staffed. The members of staff on board are called PSAs (Passenger Service Agents) or when the system orginally opened: “Train Captains”.

During normal service they’re responsible for operating the doors, ensuring the train is safe to depart each station and assisting passengers. However they’re also required to drive the trains manually within the depots and also in the event of technical problems with the ATO (Automatic Train Operation) system. DLR trains can’t move under ATO without a PSA using the control panel by the doors.

Its also worth remembering that 8 tube lines are also fitted with ATO (Victoria, Jubilee, Central, Northern, District, Circle, Hammersmith and City, Metropolitan) and the drivers on these lines have a similar role during normal service (except they sit in the cab and they’re officially known as “Train Operators”).

If you’re interested in the role of the PSAs, heres an old training video showing how they’d rescue a failed train, things will have changed since 1988 but its still interesting to see.

The hype is real, it really is a fantastic ride!

If its any consolation, there are many entries on your list I wish I could ride! I’ve just started planning a US east coast trip for next year with some friends so we’re hoping to hit King’s Dominion, BGW and SFGAdv (and maybe Nick Universe and Coney Island) but it’s still early days so hopefully we can get a plan together.

Here’s mine:

1. Zadra - Energylandia
2. Ride to Happiness - Plopasland De Panne
3. Taron - Phantasialand
4. Hyperion - Energylandia
5. FLY - Phantasialand
6. ICON - Blackpool Pleasure Beach
7. Nemesis - Alton Towers
8. Black Mamba - Phantasialand
9. Oblivion - Alton Towers
10. The Smiler - Alton Towers

Total credits: 136 (according to CoasterCount’s ‘Real Coaster’ definition)

I must admit… as I’ve gotten out to more parks, watching the Alton Towers’ (my local park) coasters slide down the list has been slightly sad haha.

Looks like the update has resolved the issue with stale content on the frontpage Hot/Active filters as well!

I’ve also noticed this.

I’ve also noticed that when I leave the front page open in subscribed view I occasionally get a sudden flood of posts appearing, they’re always from remote instances and normally older posts (sometimes a few days old). It kinda looks like they’re only just being received by our instance at that point, although I’m not familiar enough with Lemmy to say thats 100% whats happening. But if we’re not reliably receiving posts then that could explain why the front page content is stale.

RCDB says Jetline was actually manufactured by Zierer, along with the clone of this coaster (BMRX/Knightmare) and Lisebergbanan. But it’s definitely using Schwarzkopf’s design and the fact that this keeps happening suggests problems with the design. As @MouseAT@opencoaster.net said, Grona Lund doesn’t seem like the type of place to skimp on maintainance.

Hopefully whichever company is currently supporting these old coasters can figure out a solution, the fact that this has happened again is inexcusable.

I can access biology@mander.xyz on feddit.uk at the URL https://feddit.uk/c/biology@mander.xyz

There are were no posts visible, which is probably because no one from our instance has subscribed to it yet. Until someone from feddit.uk subscribes to it, our instance won’t be receiving any content from it.

If you (or anyone else from feddit.uk) subscribes, then you’ll begin to see new content which is posted in future. If you want to make an existing post/comment visible within our instance, copy the link to the post/comment into the search box on our instance and it should then be retrieved and become visible.

I just tested this out by getting feddit.uk to retrieve this post which is now visible when you check biology@mander.xyz from this instance.

Federation certainly has a learning curve, but its not too bad once you get your head around it. Hope that helps explain it! 🙂

v0.18 hasn’t actually been released yet (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases) but it is planned to release very soon. Looks like Jerboa is just a tad early https://feddit.uk/comment/288934

Hopefully as Lemmy becomes more mature, updates can be better planned to avoid breaking things like this.

It feels like there ought to be means to personally penalise company directors for stuff like this. I suspect they’d take much greater interest in paying employees properly if their own necks were on the line.

All too often, large businesses treat fines for breaking the rules as just another operating cost.

In September I’m going on holiday to Singapore with friends so we’ll be visiting Universal Studios Singapore while we’re there. I think its the smallest of the Universal parks, but it’ll be my first so I’m really looking forward to it!

Certainly agree with you about the variety aspect.

I think this became clear to me when I rode Ride To Happiness earlier this year. I thought I knew what a spinning coaster was, but then Mack comes along and completely blows away my expectations! Its amazing that ride manufacturers are able to keep coming up with new experiences to keep us on our toes.

I visited in October last year (also from the UK) with a group of friends. I’d say its 100% worth the trip! Zadra (my current #1 coaster) and Hyperion are the 2 standout coasters. Abyssus is a excellent new-gen Vekoma multi-launch. Plus the park has a huge number of family and kiddy creds.

My main advice would be to pre-book your transport to the park well in advance. The park is located in Zator which is about halfway between Krakow and Katowice, but it is in the middle of nowhere. We stayed in Krakow and did 2 days at the park. The park runs a daily coach between Krakow and the park but by the time we came to book it, seats for our second day had run out. Zator does have a train station so we assumed we’d be able to get a train, but the staff at Krakow’s main station weren’t overly helpful and we ended up taking a taxi. (Fortunately Poland is pretty cheap so it wasn’t too bad after we split the cost between us). We took the coach on the first day, and it was far easier so I’d highly recommend doing that. You can book on their website (https://energylandia.pl/en/dojazd/autobus/)

Happy to answer any other questions :)

Personally, I found that getting comfortable with coasters came with time as I rode more coasters. The more coasters you ride, the better you’re able to anticipate what a new coaster will feel like even before you’ve ridden it, this takes away the fear of the unknown making it easier to relax and enjoy the ride.

Another tip I’d give (especially if you’re feeling nervous about the safety aspect) is to research how coasters are made and all of the engineering and testing that goes into every rollercoaster.