This would be a wild ride!
Interesting, but I have to wonder if they’ve tested and accounted for every possible failure mode.
Evergreen Air and Space (and Boy’s Life) Museum http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/ has a waterpark next door that you go up into a 747 on the roof and take waterslides out of the fuselage down to the bottom.
I didn’t do that. My kid did. But I would recommend the museum.
It looks as though it is configured so as to create ‘dwell’ spots where the ride (that is from the POV of the rider) slows down, reverses, then continues again - I think probably the biggest risks are:
[ul]
[li]The ‘dwell’ works too well, and permits one rider to catch up with another (could be overcome by only allowing one through at a time, I guess)[/li][li]If it stops rotating for any reason, how do you get the people out?[/li][li]If it stops rotating and you can’t get the people out quickly, does the place where they are stuck continue to fill with water?[/li][/ul]
It doesn’t look to me like it slows or reverses. I think you fall to the lowest spot, and as the wheel rotates you linger in place until another spot is lower than you are. Rinse, rinse, repeat.
Yeah, stuff like that. And you know someone is going to try and hold himself in place while the wheel turns in order to get a better drop to the next low spot. Hold on too long and you don’t so much ride as plummet.
I watched both videos, it looks pretty tame. Because the surface is always slippery there’s no way to build any real height, therefore there’s no speed. If you watch the render from 1:24 to 1:35 the riders tend to just slosh around at the bottom of the contraption while it rotates around them. That’s a long time to be in the tubes just waiting to get processed out.