Guide to Building Mini Helicopters in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2

The Mini Helicopters are a Gentle Ride added in RCT1's Corkscrew Follies expansion pack and are featured in all future installments. In RCT1, they are named the "Cycle Monorail", not to be confused with the Monorail Cycles. RCT2 renames the ride to "Mini Helicopters", which carries over to RCT Classic and OpenRCT2.

(Helicycles in Gentle Glen)

“Powered helicopter shaped cars running on a steel track, controlled by the pedaling of the riders.” - In-game description.

Pre-Built Designs

Building Information

• Base Cost (With Scenery): $2,327.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$2,345.60 (OpenRCT2)
• Base Cost (Without Scenery): $1,000.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$1,018.60 (OpenRCT2)

Stats

• Excitement Rating: 2.71
• Intensity Rating: 0.48
• Nausea Rating: 0.01

Ride Length

• Distance: 754ft (230m)
• Time: 2 minutes, 21 seconds

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 1.60
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.40
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Requirements

• Length of at least 525ft (160m)

If this is failed, all three stats will be divided by 2.

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 70
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 45

Building Information

• Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $18.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$18.70 (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $12.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$12.50 (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $2.50*
• Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 30ft/9m/+6

*Vanilla RCT2 does not decimal points in its support costs. Instead it will round down or round up to the next whole dollar amount at certain height intervals to equalize the amount as if it were spending a decimal amount. In OpenRCT2, it will correctly spend the decimal amount every time.

Other Information

• Maximum Guests Per Car: 2
• Maximum Number of Cars: Depends on track length - Upper limit of 12 in RCT1, 31 in Vanilla RCT2, and 255 in OpenRCT2.
• Sheltered?: Yes

Building the Mini Helicopters

The Mini Helicopters are for all intents and purposes, a different form of the Car Ride. They use all of the same track pieces (except that OpenRCT2 doesn't add the Spinning Tunnel like it does for the Car Ride), meaning that it is just like the Car Ride, a very simple tracked ride that's good for beginners to learn the mechanics of the game with, and is able to be built nice and compactly.

Just like the Car Ride and the Ghost Train, the Mini Helicopters has the same interaction with door scenery pieces. You can build them on the track itself, and when the helicopter approaches the door, it will open up and then the door will close once it passes through. The Jellycopters pre-built makes extensive use of this mechanic.

The Mini Helicopters however are not strictly a reskinned Car Ride. The ride comes with some important characteristic changes, some positive and some negative. The Mini Helicopters has a maximum height of 6 units above ground level, whereas the Car Ride has a maximum height of 5 units above ground level. For most designs, this advantage is minimal at beast, but in a few situations, this one extra unit of height can make a huge difference. This also means that it's easier to build the ride in mountainous parks as the track is able to navigate around the undulating terrain easier.

Whereas the Car Ride has a whopping 12 different vehicle choices, the Mini Helicopters only has a single vehicle type. Each helicopter car supports 2 seats and is sheltered from the rain, whereas almost every vehicle type on the Car Ride carries only one of these traits or the other. The only Car Ride vehicle with both are the Black Cabs. This means that the Mini Helicopters carries an advantage over the Car Ride if you're building it in a park with the Cool and Wet climate.

The Mini Helicopters do however, carry one heavy downside compared to the Car Ride, which is the fact that the helicopter cars move very slowly. Even slower than the average Car Ride vehicle, which is already quite slow. The helicopter cars have a top speed of 2mph (3km/h) when travelling on flat track or uphill, and a top speed of 4mph (6km/h) when travelling downhill. This is a slower flat track and uphill top speed than every vehicle type on the Car Ride, and ties with four vehicle types on that ride for having the slowest uphill speed.

Despite having a smaller sprite size than most Car Ride vehicles, the Mini Helicopters does not have an inherent space advantage over it. Here are two identical track designs built with both ride types. This design can hold 18 helicopter cars, whereas on the Car Ride version, it can hold either 18 Cheshire Cats, 19 Pickup Trucks, 19 Racing Cars, 16 Sports Cars, or 17 Vintage Cars.

This effectively means that the only true advantages of the Mini Helicopters are its slightly higher support limit, and its vehicles being double-seaters with rain protection, which it trades off for being slower all around. This also means that it's easier to accidentally overbuild the Mini Helicopters as it will take longer for it to complete any given design compared to if that design were built with the Car Ride instead. The Mini Helicopters does try to make up for this though by having a smaller minimum length requirement of 160 meters instead of the Car Ride's 200 meters.

Otherwise, the two rides share a lot of other characteristics with each other. They both have the same track piece cost for track piece, the same support cost, and the same track pieces. If you know how to build one of these rides, you know how to build the other.

In spite of being a human-powered ride, guests do not expend Energy faster while pedalling the helicopter cars. Additionally, all guests will pedal at the exact same speed regardless of their current Energy level. These are both traits shared by all of the other human-powered rides in the game.

The Mini Helicopters however, can function without guests, and it does have a testing option, which are both traits that neither of the other human-powered rides in the game possess. Any empty helicopters will be able to move along the track just fine despite having no one to work the pedals on it, implying that the vehicles can still work on a motor if the guests either can't or don't want to power it manually. Ironically, the empty cars on the Mini Helicopters has a much smaller effect on its speed than empty cars on other tracked rides have as the empty cars will move at almost the same exact speed as full ones.

Stats

The Mini Helicopters are one area where it is both the same, and worse than the Car Ride. It has all of the same rating modifiers and the same values for those modifiers as the Car Ride. The table of all rating modifiers down below are exactly the same for both rides.

The same BonusTrainLength exploit that the Car Ride has in OpenRCT2 however does not work with the Mini Helicopters, for some inexplicable reason. If you use cheats to give the ride an extremely long train, it will never give you any finished test results no matter how long you wait for.

The only differences in stat modifiers that the ride has is that the Mini Helicopters has a lower length requirement of 525ft (160m) compared to the Car Ride's length requirement of 656ft (200m). Failing this requirement will also only divide the ride's Excitement Rating by 2, whereas on the Car Ride, failing this requirement divides its by 8.

The Mini Helicopters has a base Excitement and Intensity of 1.60 and 0.40, which is 0.40 and 0.10 lower than the respective base stats of the Car Ride. Since the ride has all of the same values for stat modifiers, this means that any given design built with the Mini Helicopters will have roughly 0.40 less Excitement and 0.10 less Intensity compared to if you built that same exact design with the Car Ride instead (assuming the design meets the length requirement of both rides). The BonusAverageSpeed, BonusMaxSpeed, and BonusDuration modifiers however will changing this stat discrepancy as the lower average speed of the Mini Helicopters will affect all three of these. The practical effect of this can be seen on the pre-builts for both rides. Most pre-builts on the Car Ride have an Excitement Rating of 3.00 or higher, with some cracking the 3.50 mark, whereas only one pre-built of the Mini Helicopters is an Excitement Rating higher than 3.00

Throughput and Profit

As with most characteristics of the Mini Helicopters, it carries many of the same internal values as the Car Ride. It has the exact same value multipliers for all three ratings, though because it will have a lower Excitement Rating, it will have a slightly lower maximum ticket price than an identical Car Ride design. Due to the lower speed of the vehicles, this means that the Mini Helicopters will inherently have both a lower throughput and a smaller profit than a Car Ride.

With no minimum waiting time, the Jellycopters pre-built will have a number of guests per hour that fluctuates between 672 and 912 guests per hour, which works out to an average of 792 guests per hour.

In between 5 and 13 months old, the Jellycopters pre-built can have a maximum ticket price of $5.00 in OpenRCT2. If it ran for a whole in-game year at this price point, it would have an hourly profit of just over $3,700.00 after factoring in the operating cost (assuming it has the guests to keep it consistently popular, and didn't break down a single time). This is a much lower potential profit than a Car Ride, but because the Mini Helicopters are inherently sheltered with two seats per vehicle, it will make some of that discrepancy back up in rainy parks. That said, in a rainy park, you always have the option of building the Car Ride mostly underground anyway, so this advantage is not impactful as it might seem.

Just like the Car Ride, be weary of its minimum waiting time of 10 seconds. As is the case on the Car Ride, you should change this to 0 seconds as soon as you build the ride so that cars aren't stuck waiting at the entrance when guests get in them, and this will also prevent a traffic jam at the end of the ride.

Due to its lower throughput, the ride will also have a longer queue time (as you can see on the Jellycopters), meaning that it is more prone to having guest complaints.

Verdict

The Mini Helicopters is overall a worse version of the Car Ride. While it has a few advantages over it, such as its higher support limit, and the ability to hold two guests per vehicle while being inherently sheltered, its lower running speed means that it will generate quite a fair amount less money. For all practical purposes, any Mini Helicopters design would be better off if it were a Car Ride instead.

However, while it is worse than the Car Ride, it is still a tracked Gentle Ride, which inherently makes it a better and more profitable ride than almost all of the gentle flat rides. Just like the Car Ride, it's also simply a pretty ride to look at. If you don't mind playing suboptimally for the sake of aesthetics, a Mini Helicopter ride will add some visual charm and variety to the park.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]