NL2 WIP: Albatross (Wingrider)

Recently, some combination of hand manipulating and using the in-game FVD has been my primary mode of building. I was pretty excited about the wingrider release and had been fooling around with the FVD panel to figure out how it works with the wingriders (not too poorly overall). This was not the first attempt, but certainly the one I am happiest with. I have a second half built, but I'm not happy with it and it has e-stop problems. The attached are just the opening act.

133' first drop, overbanked horseshoe, inclined loop, zero-g roll (x2)

Can anyone suggest a name for the element that basically forms a twisted horseshoe roll out of two zero-gs? Or should it just be... two zero Gs?

Comments and criticism appreciated!

edit: I should also say that while I'm decently happy with the track and have been wanting to use this name for a wingrider for a while (there will be more water in the environment at the end), I don't know if this is the right layout for it. Wandering Albatrosses take off like a plane, or rather vice versa, which would be perfect for a launched wingrider... but I also feel like we will be seeing plenty of those. Thoughts?

I am personally not a huge fan of the two zero g's in a row. That doesn't mean you have to change it. And they're more corkscrews than zero g rolls, in my opinion. What you have there is two copies of what X-flight does before the turn into the inline twist, which I would call a corkscrew. A zero g roll as I picture it is a linear element, like the first element on X-Flight or the first roll through the keyholes on GateKeeper. Also the first element might work better as a full blown dive loop instead of the banked curve thing, but the sequence of the first three elements works as is.

Yeah I think I fiddled so much that they ended up closer to corkscrew shaped while retaining closer to zero-G forces. For what it's worth, according to RCDB X-flight has two zero-G rolls and no corkscrews, but I do totally hear what you're saying, and even X-flight's second zero-g or corkscrew is more linear than either of mine... certainly the first. I will work on it.

As for the overbank versus dive loop, I had originally liked the idea of increasing the banking in each element until the first inversion, i.e. there's the overbank, the inclined loop which is overbanked a little further, and finally the full inversion. If you think a dive loop would work better than the turn I'm not opposed to changing it.

I like the look so for, it seems like a very disorienting first half. I think as they are the cork-rolls would be more interesting elements that are a bit more open to later interactions than standard Z-G rolls. For me, copying Gatekeeper or X-Flight wouldn't be enough to warrant a change but it's up to you lol.

I'd like to add that the first half seems pretty quick to the brakes, maybe ou can steepen and shorten the lift so it doesn't have as long as a journey up the chain and them back to the station for the second half

Yeah, I still don't know that I'll change much in the layout itself but might (will) try to tighten up the shaping some.

As for quick to brakes, do you think the first half is too short or do you think this will be remedied by steepening the lift and a proportionate return run? I'm not sure if there's a friction "problem" per se or if it's just the huge trains but the wingriders seem to run short on speed especially quickly, and while I don't need the train to blaze into the final brakes I don't want a ride that's crawling at the end either.

[TTD03]

I like the layout.
I'd say have a MCBR like GateKeeper. It slows the train enough that its not barreling into the FBR at the end, but it is not slowing the train to a crawl around the rest of the track either.

I think I need to add about 10-15 feet of height for the first drop, or something... the problem is that the train is already moving about 28mph coming into the MCBR so I have some wiggle room to raise it but not a ton if I don't want to crawling into that either. Right now the MCBR is not high enough to be able to have much of a second half that can still be completed after e-stop. It could certainly manage a post-brake finale like Gatekeeper but I don't think that's enough with the abbreviated opening.