So, yesterday I took the short drive off to the park on my standard day off. Even due the constantly changing weather conditions, it was open and managed to do a few rides on it.
Height of the train after the first forward launch. Not super high but in the front it's fun.
The actual ride entrance is further down into the park. The small theme area looks really nice.
Incorporated some typical elements in the Star Trek theme.
I do dislike that there is no gateway made in the fence near the door. Now you'd have to walk all the way to the side to enter the queue, if you don't want to climb over it.
There is quite some room for a queue on the inside, but not overly massive. I think it would hold 45-60min tops when all gates are opened.
This looked quite cool, but I noticed the projectors weren't fully aligned yet.
The Borg cube is apparently just a bunch of ciruit boards stolen from computers.
I do wonder how long this will hold. Or how long it will take before they shield this off. This was a common happening, even with the staff occasionally talking/yelling at people not to touch it.
Eventually you'd get to the end of the first queue and people are being split up in 2 smaller groups. Story begins and you are being led through a door to a smaller room. More story stuff happens and you are being transported to the ship. Some epilepsy warning here as it happens with a strobe light...
The final bit of storyline is being told on the Deck and then you are sent off to your ships.
In the hallway you'd pass people exiting the ride. (I can see people sneaking through these fences though :/ )
I've occasionally noticed that on the smaller groups, the station is just (almost) empty on arrival of the new group. Even front rows stay completely open meanwhile there are only a few left queuing for the backrow.
After boarding and bags are being put on the opposite of the station. Trains are being sent off with an alarm going off. Ready for take off!
I personally hoped more stuff happened during the transfer of the train to the launch area, but there wasn't much to see other than a monitor. The launch was quite disappointing too. As soon as the doors open, you rolled out slowly onto the launch section for the launch. (So many missed opportunities! :C ) Eventually the launch happened and the front gave a good butterfly feeling due being on a 90?? tilt. Backwards launch was good. With the front seats not noticing much of that spike. The back gave a cool view and about the same butterfly feeling as the front on the initial launch.
The final launch gave just enough power to clear the first element. Not very interesting in the front, but the backseat gave some nice airtime going down. The rolls went quite slow, about the same speed as those on Colossus. Quite funny but nothing out of control. The dive through the Borg cube was nice, funky little airtime afterwards with the little hop underneath the final roll giving a nice ejector. But same as the previous rolls, the final roll into the brake was quite slow.
Overal opinion, hard to say atm. It may be that they're still fine-tuning certain stuff but I doubt it's going to be much faster than as it is. As much as the one in Slagharen surprised me, as much as this one kinda let me down. Still a fun ride, but it's not as insane out of control as it looked to be. Also I think the lengthy pre-show stuff weighs in a bit. Very nice for the first few times. But after a few times you'd just want to continue to the station as it would take off an extra 5-10min.
The gift shop looks quite nice. A good place for a trekkie :3
I was quite lucky in the morning as the ride was down for quite a few hours during the day. It finally opened back up near the end of the day.
Well... That was the report about the new ride.
All pictures can be found here:
https://flic.kr/s/aHskWFNJQiA small mention about the park though:
Bandit has improved quite a lot on ride smoothness. I spotted a bunch of new track and from how it currently rides. A lot smoother in most of the areas. There is about 300ft of track left to do and the entire rails have been replaced in the last few years. The downside imo is that it felt downtuned as well. But that might be just because of the cold and rainy weather.