0 to AAAHHH! in 2.5 seconds.
In highschool, I had this Physics teacher named Mr. Z, a grumbling burnout of a man who liked to sneak off into the nearby forest for a smoke, and was always good for a light and a knowing wink if he ran into you there. He was also known for crafting exams with questions like, "Mario Andretti loses control of his race car on a hairpin turn, flips and flies into the stands. Assuming that Andretti's race car weighs 2500 kg and is moving at a speed of 250kph, what is his momentum when he hits the audience? Assuming that each row is occupied by ten bystanders with an average mass of 70 kg, how many rows does his car plough through before it stops?"
I was thinking of Mr. Z's questions as we drove in to Cedar Point, the Holy Mecca of roller coaster parks, and we caught a glimpse of the skeletal mountains that marked each of the park's fifteen coasters. Each of these coasters would be the marquee ride in any other amusement park, but they were dwarfed by what stood in the center -- this singular steel arc, like a huge inverted U, that was so tall it had airplane warning lights flashing in its midsection. We just stared at it and wondered what it was. Was it a coaster? a free fall ride? It can't be a coaster. It's too tall. It goes straight up. 400 feet straight up and straight down and there's no elevator or chain that pulls anything up, and, oh my god, there's corkscrews, and it is a coaster. The tallest, fastest roller coaster in the entire world.
If a roller coaster is all about hauling you up to a fearsome height and converting all of that potential terror into two minutes of sixty mile-per-hour kinetic white knuckle freefall, then the Top Thrill Dragster was a coaster pared down into its purest form -- a climb, a descent and a lot of screaming in between. It hurt to even look at it. Unfortunately, we couldn't ride it that day. It was raining and rain does dangerous things to systems that lean heavily on friction and the lack thereof. Instead, we fell back on rides with names like Mantis, Raptor and Millenium Force, ushered in by a staff that was all too eager to tell us how high we would climb and how fast we would go. There was a ride called the Wicked Twister that eschewed the traditional mechanic of hauling cars up a long, suspenseful incline and instead shot its trains into freefall. silentq's friend Krista theorized that it was probably something similar to the catapults used to send jets off aircraft carriers. I realized later on that the ride used electromagnets and linear induction motors. We weren't being catapulted. We were being shot out of railguns. Needless to say, science is awesome.
When I went skydiving, I mentioned the critical need to trust in your equipment. You don't really have that much of a choice with roller coasters because you're just along for the ride, but that still doesn't stop the fear, or the irrational calculations of a harness unlocking on a corkscrew, or the thoughts of a train coming off its rails in the middle of a loop. That's all part of the ride, after all. Without it, it's just wind in your hair and memories of a macabre Physics professor who really should have been a thrill ride designer.
I was thinking of Mr. Z's questions as we drove in to Cedar Point, the Holy Mecca of roller coaster parks, and we caught a glimpse of the skeletal mountains that marked each of the park's fifteen coasters. Each of these coasters would be the marquee ride in any other amusement park, but they were dwarfed by what stood in the center -- this singular steel arc, like a huge inverted U, that was so tall it had airplane warning lights flashing in its midsection. We just stared at it and wondered what it was. Was it a coaster? a free fall ride? It can't be a coaster. It's too tall. It goes straight up. 400 feet straight up and straight down and there's no elevator or chain that pulls anything up, and, oh my god, there's corkscrews, and it is a coaster. The tallest, fastest roller coaster in the entire world.
If a roller coaster is all about hauling you up to a fearsome height and converting all of that potential terror into two minutes of sixty mile-per-hour kinetic white knuckle freefall, then the Top Thrill Dragster was a coaster pared down into its purest form -- a climb, a descent and a lot of screaming in between. It hurt to even look at it. Unfortunately, we couldn't ride it that day. It was raining and rain does dangerous things to systems that lean heavily on friction and the lack thereof. Instead, we fell back on rides with names like Mantis, Raptor and Millenium Force, ushered in by a staff that was all too eager to tell us how high we would climb and how fast we would go. There was a ride called the Wicked Twister that eschewed the traditional mechanic of hauling cars up a long, suspenseful incline and instead shot its trains into freefall. silentq's friend Krista theorized that it was probably something similar to the catapults used to send jets off aircraft carriers. I realized later on that the ride used electromagnets and linear induction motors. We weren't being catapulted. We were being shot out of railguns. Needless to say, science is awesome.
When I went skydiving, I mentioned the critical need to trust in your equipment. You don't really have that much of a choice with roller coasters because you're just along for the ride, but that still doesn't stop the fear, or the irrational calculations of a harness unlocking on a corkscrew, or the thoughts of a train coming off its rails in the middle of a loop. That's all part of the ride, after all. Without it, it's just wind in your hair and memories of a macabre Physics professor who really should have been a thrill ride designer.