SeaWorld Orlando | Infinity Falls | River Rapids

Well.. this is some hyped up testing for a raft ride.

 

I would recommend a muscle relaxer as you may be getting more impatient before this bad boy opens from what I've heard.

 

I mean I'm surprised but I'm not? The ride isn't exactly a run of the mill installation and it has been delayed for some time and given the technical issues in other rides that were "experimental" in a way, patience is definitely a virtue.

 

While at the park yesterday, did see a few boats run and testing of the drop/lift. Local guide was implying it may still be a few weeks. Looked beautiful from what we could see. They have done a great job in regards to filling the area with vegetation.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

There's always such issues with water rides, too. You just need to look at other water rides in history to understand that they're highly likely going to experience some form of technical issue - especially something of this nature.

 

The problem is that water is chaotic and, crucially, rather heavy.

It's predictable in the sense that it will flow downhill, but quite how it does that and how fast it goes and how turbulent it is is not particularly easy to work out (the equations that tell us this stuff are famously unsolved - we can just do half-decent approximations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_equations).

The problem is that it carries a lot of momentum, and so makes it difficult to work with and it'll bite if it goes wrong.

Throw some large rafts and great big 'elements' in to the mix and you've got an awful lot of uncertainty in your design, which means a lot of testing, a lot of tweaking, and a lot of faff. Especially if that tweaking requires the water to be drained down each time.

Lot of sympathy, and respect, for the engineers trying to pull this off.