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Thirteen: General Discussion

Even the old beggar woman couldn't compete with the Intamin curse.

Never really liked how they did that station, always felt like a bit of a cop out.
 
Sir John advised that the scaffolding was (unsurprisingly) a cost driven decision. They manufactured casts to mirror the stone used for the Towers onto sections of the station, but that construction method was apparently very cost prohibitive and thus large sections of the station ended up with the scaffold.
 
Expect in the coming seasons for everything to be stripped off, revealing the corrugated metal underneath. Paint it black and you'll have taken it to the next level of Merlin theming. If you can't have a shipping container, make it look like a shipping container. Genius.
 
venny said:
Sir John advised that the scaffolding was (unsurprisingly) a cost driven decision. They manufactured casts to mirror the stone used for the Towers onto sections of the station, but that construction method was apparently very cost prohibitive and thus large sections of the station ended up with the scaffold.
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Partially true, the side facing the Towers always had the scaffolding on the planning permission (with broken flying buttresses sticking out of it). I think the planning team were not keen on a faux ruin being visible from fountain square.

The rest of the building was meant to be stone effect clad though, and the buttresses seemed to disappear.
 
Dave said:
I think the planning team were not keen on a faux ruin being visible from fountain square.
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Hilarious to think of the planning team being fussy over that when you consider it was a garish poor mans Flintstones land for a decade or so.
 
I'm sorry if I've posted this in the wrong place, but I'm not sure where else to post this (and I didn't want to create a new thread just for this topic):-

John Wardley has stated multiple times that part of his motivation for making Thirteen a 'family friendly' ride was so that the height restriction would be lower than other coasters and thus children who were too short to ride Nemesis would be able to ride Thirteen instead.

My questions are:-

1) How could he have been certain during the design stages that Thirteen would have a lower height requirement? Is it because the ride does not invert and thus only requires a simple lap bar? Do OTSRs inherently only fit taller riders?

2) Who decides the height requirement for each ride? Is it Alton Towers, the HSE, or somebody else? What criteria is used to determine the correct height?

3) Instead of designing Thirteen to have a low height requirement, would it theoretically have been possible to reduce Nemesis' height requirement instead? I realise that this might sound unsafe / absurd, but I seem to recall that Nemesis and Shockwave both launched with a 1.2m height requirement in 1994, but both were later increased to 1.4m, and so presumably there is some flexibility in these requirements?
 
DiogoJ42 said:
I believe that height limits are 98% manufacturer safety standards for that ride type, and 2% "park wants to make it look more scary than it is".
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I remember reading that "Space Station Zero" at Thorpe Park used OTSRs simply to make the ride seem more intense than it actually is (hence why the restraints were changed to lap bars when it reopened as The Flying Fish).

I also was never sure whether the height requirements were simply to stop smaller children from falling out and / or were also a crude way of measuring somebody's age as well.

The only other reason for artificially increasing the height requirement that I can think of would be to prevent people from riding in order to keep queue lengths down (i.e. to divert smaller children to other rides instead), but I'm not sure whether a park would ever actually want to do this, as they would essentially be sabotaging their own ride.
 
When a park wants a new coaster they will generally request quotes from a number of manufacturers and provide an outline of what they're looking for - this might include approximate size/location, thrill level, height restriction, capacity requirements, etc. In the case of Thirteen, Towers would likely have specified they wanted a high-capacity family ride with a low height restriction. Intamin woud do the rest based on that brief. The height restriction is set by the manufacturer based on the characteristics of the ride. The train design and ride dynamics will factor into this but there is no set rule for what height restrictions should be for any given ride type. Some manufacturers carry out ergonomic assessments to demonstrate the height restriction is appropriate.

In the UK, height restrictions are often used in lieu of age restrictions. Rides in Germany often have both age and height restrictions but we generally don't bother due to it being impractical to enforce age restrictions. Parks also sometimes go higher than the manufacturer's minimum - notably Saw's 1.4m minimum height is the same as other coasters at Thorpe but much higher than most other Eurofighters
 
Secret Weapon said:
1) How could he have been certain during the design stages that Thirteen would have a lower height requirement? Is it because the ride does not invert and thus only requires a simple lap bar? Do OTSRs inherently only fit taller riders?
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he was designing it with intamin, they would have had a design brief that it was family ride, accomodating 1.2m people, intamin would have then decided on the force limits of the ride and the thus "class" of restraint (there are many depending o nthings such as the force envelope, from (I think) class 1 (no restrain, very low force, think park train) to (I think) class 5 (extreme posetive, negetive forwards or backwards forces, over the sholder is required, computer detection is required, etc, etc. they would have then designed a restrain for that class for the sized rider. it could have been rased if an issue was noticed, but that isn't too frequent.

Secret Weapon said:
2) Who decides the height requirement for each ride? Is it Alton Towers, the HSE, or somebody else? What criteria is used to determine the correct height?
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so, intamin will say a minimum height, then AT will take that and make it at least that to match either measurements or the rest of your line up (e.g if you are an american park rarther than 31.345234 inches you make it 32 inches)

Secret Weapon said:
3) Instead of designing Thirteen to have a low height requirement, would it theoretically have been possible to reduce Nemesis' height requirement instead? I realise that this might sound unsafe / absurd, but I seem to recall that Nemesis and Shockwave both launched with a 1.2m height requirement in 1994, but both were later increased to 1.4m, and so presumably there is some flexibility in these requirements?
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I find it unlikely, B&M designed the force envelope of Nemesis for a high class restraint, B&M would have figured out the body proportions and then designed who fits, I am not sure I could find a source saying nemesis was 1.4m, but it would be possible that B&M decided that 1.4m was required after some further research (although B&M seemed to mostly use 1.4m design for their thrill rides so I think it may have always been 1.4) depending on the ride (high forces can be bad for young children) they may be able to change the seat, but that could introduce some problems for accommodating larger people.
 
flyingguitar said:
he was designing it with intamin, they would have had a design brief that it was family ride, accomodating 1.2m people, intamin would have then decided on the force limits of the ride and the thus "class" of restraint (there are many depending o nthings such as the force envelope, from (I think) class 1 (no restrain, very low force, think park train) to (I think) class 5 (extreme posetive, negetive forwards or backwards forces, over the sholder is required, computer detection is required, etc, etc. they would have then designed a restrain for that class for the sized rider. it could have been rased if an issue was noticed, but that isn't too frequent.


so, intamin will say a minimum height, then AT will take that and make it at least that to match either measurements or the rest of your line up (e.g if you are an american park rarther than 31.345234 inches you make it 32 inches)


I find it unlikely, B&M designed the force envelope of Nemesis for a high class restraint, B&M would have figured out the body proportions and then designed who fits, I am not sure I could find a source saying nemesis was 1.4m, but it would be possible that B&M decided that 1.4m was required after some further research (although B&M seemed to mostly use 1.4m design for their thrill rides so I think it may have always been 1.4) depending on the ride (high forces can be bad for young children) they may be able to change the seat, but that could introduce some problems for accommodating larger people.
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B&Ms in the UK minimum heights are actually something like 1.345 but we round them up to make it easier.
 
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