Hello everyone! Some of you may remember me as that guy who had been working on a series of BGW recreations last year. So where have I been? What have I been up to? Well, I had a pretty big life change that involved moving to another state/job change, so I have had limited time. However, I put BGW on hold because I felt my NL2 skills just weren't quite where I wanted them to be in order to create a near 100% authentic BGW experience. So, I came up with an idea: Make a fictional park that follows a similar development path to BGW, and work out the kinks there, so when I get back to work on BGW, I will have a better idea how to get things exactly how I want. I also was running into problems with BGW where my various experiments were creating lots of directory clutter, so this will help me get those bad habits sorted out, streamlining the BGW development process later on.
So anyhow, here's where we meet my test park: Bracken Rise!
The back story I invented for this park is that it is a small family owned park turned big leagues. Founded in 1955, it originally was a camp site on a privately owned lake. Rides were added, and soon the park became a tourist destination. By the mid 1970s, it was growing at an unprecedented rate, and suddenly found itself in the big leagues. With the opening of their first major roller coaster in 1979, the park began moving towards a prominent spotlight in coaster enthusiast travel plans everywhere!
Coasters:
Name: Livewire
Model: Arrow Custom Looper/Ron Toomer
BGW Analogue: The Loch Ness Monster
Simulated year of opening: 1979
Height: 132ft
Speed: 56mph
Inversions: 4
Inversion List: Interlocking Loops, double corkscrew
Trivia: The ride is timed so that if a train is dispatched the moment the train in front clears lift 1, the trains will perform a double looper.
Name: Valkerie
Model: Arrow Suspended Coaster/Ron Toomer
BGW Analogue: The Big Bad Wolf
Simulated year of opening: 1986
Height: 94ft.
Speed: 41mph
Inversions: 0
Trivia: This ride interacts with Live Wire and Rampage.
Name: Mamba
Model: B&M Hyper
BGW Analogue: Apollo's Chariot
Simulated year of opening: 2000
Height: 233ft
Speed: 81mph
Inversions: 0
Trivia: I actually originally had an Arrow custom looper here called The Reticulated Python (Retic for short) which had 8 inversions, a Steel Phantom style drop, and was designed to be a hybrid of Drachen Fire and Steel Phantom. I was going to use it for making Drachen Fire style cars. For some reason, the file became corrupt and I kept getting stack overflow errors when trying to load it. When I changed the coaster type to hyper, and deleted all but the lift, it started working. So, much like the two Arrow it was based on, it got scrapped, and I repurposed the path of the first part of Retic for this ride. Funny huh?
Name: Thrasher
Model: B&M Invert
BGW Analogue: Alpengeist
Simulated year of opening: 2004
Height: 167 ft.
Speed: 66mph
Inversions: 7
Inversion List: Dive-Over loop, Vertical Loop, Cobra Roll, Vertical Loop, Zero G Roll, Wing Over.
Trivia: This ride used to pull 7gs until Cool5 pointed that out to me and it was fixed. The turn before the cobra roll pulls up to 4.8 Gs, which if real, would make it the most intense inverted coaster in the world. The turns at the end are pushed tight enough to exceed 3gs right up to the break run, inspired by Raptor.
Name: Sandstorm
Model: Mack Family Multi Launch
BGW Analogue: Verbolten
Simulated year of opening: 2008
Height: 100ft
Speed: 55mph
Inversions: 0
Trivia: Double launch coaster. Eventually this will have a dual dispatch, similar to Verbolten. I made this coaster to learn how to script that. I finished a 6 pack of beer in 1 sitting while trying to tweak the block sections to time perfectly the way it does.
Name: Fallout
Model: B&M Dive Machine
BGW Analogue: Griffon
Simulated year of opening: 2011
Height: 225
Speed: 76.5mph
Inversions: 4
Inversion List: Immelman, Vertical Loop, Cutback, Zero G Roll
Trivia: Getting the zero G roll to work was a nightmare, I see why B&M waited so long and doesn't put 10 wide trains through one. If this were a real ride, the outside seats would get CRAZY g-forces pushed on them, though it is within acceptable limits.
Name: Poltergeist
Model: Mack Family Multi Launch
BGW Analogue: Verbolten
Simulated year of opening: 2013
Height: 185ft
Speed: 70mph
Inversions: 6
Trivia: If real, this would have the tallest inversion in the world.
Name: Rampage
Model: Launch Timberliner
BGW Analogue: N/A
Simulated year of opening: 2016
Height: 130ft
Speed: 67mph
Inversions: 1
Inversion List: zero G roll
Trivia: Obviously Busch does not have a woodie, but I felt they need one. After Lightning Rod was announced, I was inspired! This coaster would be a speed, airtime, and intensity machine! Also, with the new wooden coaster in China with a true wooden zero-G roll, I thought maybe RMC shouldn't be the only ones with that trick right now, and this could be true on wooden coaster! I did modify 1 support on Retic to make this work, which I kept when Retic became Mamba.
As an added bonus, here's a few shots of the now-defunct Reticulated Python.
Name: The Reticulated Python
Model: Next Gen Arrow Custom Looper/Ron Toomer
BGW Analogue: Drachen Fire
Simulated year of opening: 1994
Height: 230
Speed: 81mph
Inversions: 8
Inversion List: Wrap Around Corkscrew, Vertical Loop, Batwing, Diving Corkscrew, Pretzel Twist, Cutback.
Trivia: My plans were to use this coaster to test 3ds of Drachen Fire style trains. This ride borrowed some inspiration from Steel Phantom. I also designed this coaster in a manner that would match Arrow, but be slightly more advanced (more comfortable on the rider), as an option Arrow might have come out with in 1994 to stay competitive. The giant disk swings into the Batwing (cobra roll) for added thrill on both rides! For reasons unknown, this coaster's file became corrupt, so it was scraped. Mamba follows the initial lift and 3 drops of Retic verbatim.