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Tallest Roller Coaster in the World
Coaster Art Guy writes "Cedar Point amusement park unveiled the tallest roller coaster in the world today. Top Thrill Dragster launches you from 0 to 120 MPH in 4 seconds via a hydraulic launch. The dragster looking like cars take you straight up a 420 foot tower, into a top hat element, and twists you 270 degrees straight down. All in about 20 seconds from start to finish. How about that one? Also check out the POV video here Quicktime or here Windows Media Player."
Cedar Point's Millenium Force coaster is 310 feet high.
The current highest out and back coaster, according to Guinness, is the Steel Dragon in Japan.
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Probably because at 120 MPH you need to add 176 feet to the rollercoaster for every imperial second you want to add to the ride.
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Cedar Point is a one admission fee-for-everything in the park (ridewise) It doesn't matter if the cycle 100 or 10000 people through an hour.
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The millenium force gets 1600 riders/hr. This one is predicted to get 1500. Usually the turnover is dictated by the size of a train and how fast you can load/unload them. There will be a train going up the hill, one on the track and one in the house loading/unloading. When they are going 70-120 mph, you'd need an awfully long track to change this model. Since this coaster is so fast, there will only be one train going up the hill or on the track. All the others will be loading/unloading and keep the line moving that way.
I think the reason it is short is twofold. 1) Cedar Point is on an peninsula and space is getting scarce. 2) No one really cares what comes after the first hill.
I don't believe it is as simple as some of the "screw the customer and move 'em along" remarks would lead you to believe
Because this type of coaster is still in its infancy. This is clearly an evolution of the Thrust Air 2000 coaster invented by S&S Sports Power, and it follows the same basic design -- a catapult launch, a 90 pitchup, a 180 pitchover to nose down, and back to the launch point, throwing in a 360 roll during the descent to heighten the thrill.
The selling points of this type of ride are the catapult launch -- instead of the long, slow crank up the lift hill, you're shot off the mark, reaching maximum speed almost immediately -- the vertical climb and dive, and the 'hang time' spent in free fall. You come out of the dive at close to the 120mph at which you entered the climb; at that speed, any of the fancy track elements you see on slower coasters would create unacceptably huge G forces on the riders -- if you look at the other 'gigacoasters', they have one or more secondary hills after the first drop to bleed some of the speed off the coaster train before they start any serious turns, and these coasters use speed and drop height as their selling points, not inversions, while the coasters that are known for their inversion count are all much slower than the gigacoasters. Top Thrill makes its mark from its height; adding more hills detracts from the purity of the single vertical hill (and the attraction of rides like SFMM's 'Superman: The Escape', which is nothing but a shot out, up, down, and back), and slowing the coaster train down enough so that inverting track elements are survivable detracts from the ride's speed. And, as another poster has pointed out, Cedar Point is running out of space to put new coasters.