Busch Gardens Williamsburg Project 2023: DarKoaster (Multi-Lap Intamin Straddle Coaster)

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Greatest issue I have with this ride is wishing the height requirement was a little less. It's a fairly tame ride and doesn't solve the lack of options in the sub 48" guest. It's not a ride I'm super interested in riding again soon with anything over a 15 min wait, and this is going to be 60+minutes all the time.
 
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Flavatog said:
Greatest issue I have with this ride is wishing the height requirement was a little less. It's a fairly tame ride and doesn't solve the lack of options in the sub 48" guest. It's not a ride I'm super interested in riding again soon with anything over a 15 min wait, and this is going to be 60+minutes all the time.
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The only reason I can think of that would create a 48” minimum is the ability to reach the handlebars
 
Memles said:
One of the children at the media shoot on Wednesday was too short to comfortably reach the bars even when she was tall enough to ride, and they had her grab onto the other bar, yes.
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They had us do a set of rides with our hands on the other handles I assume the purpose was for some sort of president instruction video.
 
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Just got off the ride, here's my very raw thoughts after one ride -

Fun little ride, effects are cool and more than I was expecting. Obviously prefer Darkastle, but this ride was never matching it.

Lack of story in the queue is obvious. Capacity is horrid. Having a coaster station in that building doesn't work, throws off the ambiance entirely. The entire ride feels like it shouldn't exist, but it is fun in its own right
 
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@Zachary I appreciate the feedback you gave to my post earlier. Nad not trying to excuse a poorly thoughout load/unload/capacity.

My thought is maybe just the timing of understanding the load/unload procedures can help. Also it sounds like part of the queue isn’t quite ready? If that’s true I can see it “helping” with the dispatch times and lines by making it move in chucks rather than small amounts at a time.

I’m not there and haven’t ridden it, but is there potential fixes? I think without being there the obvious is a different train design that could hold more people. But I’ve seen the scrim idea brought up a few times….would that allow a launch to happen? Is there a possibility to go back to unload and load platforms being different if it’s not already like that? Then you could do when train 1 hits the brakes, train 2 launches, then the time it takes for train 1 to go unload, load, dispatch might still be the same but it ‘feels’ quicker because it’s not just sitting there for a long time.

I saw your programming suggestion. Hopefully something like that would be in the long term plans and hopefully the slower times is ‘intentional’ for them to have the timing of everything down.

Wildly disappointing to say the least. And I know I may seem like I’m being annoyingly optimistic. I just hope that it’s more a growing pain of understanding the timing of everything than actual ride problems.
 
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This afternoon we’re on the Rhine River and a team member who made the enjoyable ride not so fun by talking loudly the entire ride……but anyhow. He went on and on about the “abysmal” loading times of Darkoaster and it’s flaws. But also interesting….he states he was told last night that while Darkoaster will run during bad weather when other coasters close the parks plan is to close the Darkastle queue to new guests when the park goes to “red” weather conditions because since everything else will be closed everyone will go to Darkoaster and they don’t want to overwhealm
it. Again….who knows so take it for what it’s worth.
 
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Got my ride yesterday; well, experienced half the ride before we were evacuated at the booster… ( lights on inside and everything) was unfortunate and they only gave us a re ride ticket. Which would have required us to get back in line and wait over an hour for an unfinished experience. Appreciated the gesture but wasn’t getting back in the line.
 
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Flavatog said:
So out of curiosity what are the specs on other bgw ride capacity, both coasters and non coaster? Obviously this number is awful but now I want to know how everything else fares
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My understanding is that really only Tempesto has a lower capacity than darkoaster, but I’m not sure.
 
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WDWRLD said:
This afternoon we’re on the Rhine River and a team member who made the enjoyable ride not so fun by talking loudly the entire ride……but anyhow. He went on and on about the “abysmal” loading times of Darkoaster and it’s flaws. But also interesting….he states he was told last night that while Darkoaster will run during bad weather when other coasters close the parks plan is to close the Darkastle queue to new guests when the park goes to “red” weather conditions because since everything else will be closed everyone will go to Darkoaster and they don’t want to overwhealm
it. Again….who knows so take it for what it’s worth.
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So 1, it's very unprofessional to bad mouth your own park's new ride. Not saying what theyre saying it isn't true, but just looks bad. If the park administration finds out who this was, there will probably be a discussion. 2, red makes sense as that's the code that shuts down all rides regardless of enclosure type so that guests can shelter in place if the weather code goes to purple. The whole "we don't want to overwhelm" is 100% dippindots hearsay.
 
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