Quiver Wooden Roller Coaster

(To download, click the title image at the bottom of this page)

So this ride began back in my high school physics classroom. Besides the usual tests and labs, one of the assignments was an individual project that would be presented to the class at the end of the month. We had several options for types of projects, and the last one was left purposely ambiguous: “PhysArt”. That was pretty much as straight-forward an invitation as possible to a pretentious coaster geek such as myself to design a coaster in NoLimits representing the more artistic side of roller coaster design. Plus it gave me an excuse for a month to play endlessly with NoLimits under the guise that I was doing homework (which I was… (…) )

Since I was still tinkering with the idea of ride progression at the time, and obviously influenced by the lengthy sequencing found on the then-under-construction Voyage, I decided the best way to go about that would be to make a coaster that combined the three major genres of wooden roller coaster: out-and-back, twister and terrain. Needless to say my ego got the better of me and I was soon looking at a layout approaching 7000 ft. with a ride time over three minutes. In terms of layout progression, I can’t say that simply mixing the three different ride styles was really all that inspired or effective, however, setting it up like the Voyage with the return run taking place down hill was very important to the ride’s success. The twister section doesn’t come off as well as I would like. Serving more as a turnaround, I originally was trying a section that was a pretty formless series of curves; after two failed tries I ended up settling on a version based on the Rye Playland Aeroplane coaster. Should have been cool, but I made the spiral dives too wide so they just appeared as helices, and as a result the middle section is more ‘turning’ than ‘twister’. I tried integrating that part of the ride back in the very end, and I’m not sure if that final spiral in the coaster really pays off either. The bunny hills tipped at 45 degrees that the ride concludes with was my attempt at doing the ‘inverted forces on an airtime hill’ that were trendy at the time, and I’m not sure if they turned out very effective as a physics experiment, although they do remind me of some of the weird banking that the Gravity Group might have tried to pull off.

Just getting the track done in the month’s time was tricky enough, let alone accomplishing much in the way of supports. Because of the tight timeline the trackwork has some flaws, notably some moments of hard laterals entering or exiting a curve on the return run because the banking wasn’t formed properly. I submitted an unfinished version with only customized supports on one side of the lift hill for my physics class, and continued to work on it during the rest of the semester (including presenting a more-finished version at the end of the year just for everyone’s interest) and then over the summer, even into next fall. All of that extra time was spent pretty much working on supports. You see, on a coaster this long, just generating all the basic autosupports kills the program’s memory, and to add or move even one node I’d have a five to ten second lag before the changes would take place, which caused supporting on this ride to take forever. Surprisingly, the final version shows I cut very few corners when it came to supports, I just spent forever and a day working and waiting on them. If you want to give your machine a workout on rendering a ton of wooden supports, this is probably the ride to do it on (by my count there are more than 1500 supports on this coaster, and that’s with optimization). The trenches with covered track were supposed to be full underground tunnels, but never got that together.

The layout as I said is pretty clearly based off of the Voyage, at least for the out-and-back portions of the ride. I was surprised at how few people caught that inspiration on CoasterSims, more told me it reminded them of the Raven or the Beast than Voyage. Although unlike Voyage, here the out-and-back portion takes place in a cleared, uphill field, while the ending takes place in the woods. Originally I firgured people would respond most strongly to the first half, as the second didn’t have as clearly defined elements, more unreasonable g-forces were pulled, and it started to wallow in self-indulgance, however, once the rates started coming back it was clear that it was the ride after the midcourse brake run that everyone was talking about. The first half was rather forceless and conventional; fun, but a bit derivative. The second half, starting with the quadruple down off the midcourse, pretty much was a constant build in speed until the very end, and the wooded terrain final sort of comes out of nowhere on what had until then been a rural ride and really kicks the ride into overgear as a memorable and distinctive way to end the ride on as high a note as possible. I imagined it being built at a small midwestern park, perhaps a cross between Michigan’s Adventure and Holiday World. The wooden structure and some of the more conservative design techniques (it boasts a 70 degree banked turn rather than three 90’s) makes me think this might be what the Voyage would have looked like if it were built by CCI around 1999. It stayed on the CoasterSims top ten list for nearly two years (though it was off-and-on a lot in the second year), which was nice and I was glad to hear so many people got a lot out of it. If you ride, please give me a bit of feedback in the reply box below, thanks.

(For those of you still wondering, I got an A on the project. It helps having a physics teacher who admits to preferring wooden coaster to steel.)

Attention: Download bonus the Quiver Night Environment here

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