Posted on 07/07/2014 11:09:31 AM PDT by nickcarraway
There is a minor flaw in that advertising philosophy, since I'm in the first category, there is no way I'm ever getting on that thing........" Epic FAIL!"
LOL, it will draw you irresistably... first one person will survive, then a dozen, then hundreds, then thousands, and then suddenly you’ll find yourself on top of it screaming “Banzai!”
Yes, yes, that’s it, they announced a live date, then tore the ride down to rebuild it differently and missed that date, and two more since, all because of viral marketing..... that’s it.
Sorry but that’s nonsense, you don’t construct the ride on site completely and then tear it down and spend another month rebuilding it as part of a marketing campaign, to only have to miss the new date again.
They screwed the math, pure and simple. The entire concept is ill conceived, even the retrofitting they did to “fix” it is pretty well slap dash “engineering” as well.
Simply put, 60 MPH in a vehicle that is not connected to anything other than by gravity, filled with people who are not connected to the car by anything but gravity, sent toward a ramp clearly angled way to steep to do anything but result in flight when more than a certain load was put in the thing isn’t viral marketing, its bad math.
Don’t believe me, go watch the ride where they did it with the designer and engineer, if you watch that ride closely you’ll see they barely make it to the top of the hill, they didn’t do their math right, pure and simple. If you think engineers don’t screw up simple math, you have a lot of history of system failures to catch up on.
And if you think investors will put up millions and insurance companies will even talk to people who plan on risking public lawsuits without rock-solid engineering, you live on another planet.
At most, the risk was too great to leave to math alone, so they built an adjustable setup for final testing to both make absolutely sure the had it safe, and to see if their math applied perfectly it required real-world adjustments.
At most. But my bet is that their tests proved their math perfectly.
LOL, "barely making it to the top of the hill" is doing the math RIGHT! That's HOW you minimize the negative g- forces and keep it on the track. Go fast, and you fly off the hill!
Oh, H*ll NO!! I’ve been following all the miscalculations and watching sandbags go flying off that second hill. That will NEVER happen. I don’t care if they make it the safest slide on earth. I’m not going anywhere near that thing.
Kind of reminds me of when my two sons would get tired of the zoo - they would sprint out the front screaming, "Run! Run! The tigers got out!" :)
There are many examples of idiocy. This isn’t one of them. It’s too public, and the physics is simply too easy. Plus anyone having serious problems isn’t going to keep posting YouTube videos about how much they’ve screwed up. There’s a lot of money in this thing, and it’s being done in the open. IMO, what you see is what they want you to see.
Did you watch the video of the test where the raft came off the track? You think that was their desired outcome?
“We always ride our rides first,” Schooley said. “And we found out it was too steep and too short. So we were able to redesign it from what we learned. We tore down two-thirds of the slide and rebuilt it into the design we have now.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/26/travel/worlds-tallest-water-slide/
Yep. Test-to-fail. Insurance video showing proof of concept and proof of math, turned into a (brilliant) viral marketing scheme.
I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. Of course the guy is going to say he tore down two-thirds of it, and it was way off, etc. He made it that way in the first place! It had to be "X." So he made it "X+2." BUT - he made it so that, relatively speaking, it was easy to adjust. Not "adjustable," but also not permanently set, either. So he does films of how it doesn't work, adjusting it twice and making a big stink about it, until he gets it back down to the original "X." That way he proves his math is right, because it "works" at the level he predicted it would. And the YouTube videos guarantee a fantastic initerest in people wnating to "defy death."
It's a business based on excitement and the illusion of danger and death. That's exactly what he's doing - building the excitement. If I tied a bungy cord to you and threw you off a roof, you'd come after me with a gun. If I charged you a hundred bucks and supplied a video of your death-defying leap, you shake my hand. Business is business.
Okay, you keep that thought.
God Bless.
LOL, “keep that thought”?
Delphi, Delphi everywhere, and not a drop of cognitively neutral communications to drink.
Okay, I doubt the economics of giving up a third of a rather short season and spending an additional $1 million for the marketing stunt you claim.
http://www.fox8live.com/story/25870755/schlitterbahn-cancels-verruckts-media-rides
No
Well as far as economics are concerned, there’s economics, and then there’s regulations, and then there’s insurance. Something like this hasn’t been done before. So to do it, you don’t run out with a backhoe and a calculator and shake your fist at the sky and declare that you will succeed.
No, first you do the engineering, then you sit down with insurers, and then together you sit down with regulatory agencies and oversight boards. And then a plan is drawn up for building and testing the thing, so that it is well understood and reliable by opening day. Which means, of course, that there’s going to be a little bit of fine tuning, but by that time an enormous amount of energy and money and effort has been put into the thing.
That’s why I say we’re looking at a viral marketing scheme. If there’s no way for them to build within a timeline where all the testing can be finished by the start of the season (because they need good weather to finish buiding and to test), then the question is, how do you make up for the lost part of the season?
Well, people ride the thing to be scared. So - scare them. IF the testing was pretty much on target with minor adjustments, I’d think it was just status quo. But claiming to have to rebuild this much, and showing YouTube videos of the raft flying off? Methinks the owners doth scream deadly danger too much. Way too much. As a matter of fact, so much that it attracts attention, and makes people scared of it, even more scared than normal, and these are potential customers who want to ride it to be scared... hey, wait a minute...
Presto - twice to three times the amount of riders for a shortened first season.
IMHO
And nothing more.
The supports and shoots were not adjustable.
As I took care to point out, I meant adjustable in the sense of easier to change for engineers - not a dial on a sleep number bed.
But hey, believe what you want, I can't say I really care.
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