The Air Powered Vertical Coaster is a Roller Coaster featured in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1's Loopy Landscapes DLC and all future installments.

(Vertical Spike in Canyon Calamities)

"After an exhilarating air-powered launch, the train speeds up a vertical track, over the top, and vertically down the other side to return to the stations" - In-game description

Pre-Built Designs

*Ride ratings and statistics are measured using the ride with scenery (if it includes it), its default vehicle, and operating functions. Building the ride without scenery, as well as changing the vehicle type or operating functions will affect the results.

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 4.13
• Base Intensity Rating: 2.50
• Base Nausea Rating: 2.80

Stat Requirements

• Maximum drop height of at least 82ft (25m)

If this is failed, the ride's Excitement Rating will be divided by 4, whilst the other two ratings will be unaffected.

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 44
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 66
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 70

Building Information

• Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $150.00
• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $100.00
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $0.00
• Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): None*

*The ride itself has no support height limit, but the game has a hard cap on how tall anything can be built above standard ground level, which everything in the game is bound by. This limit is 600ft/182m/+120.

Other Information

• Maximum Guests Per Car: 2
• Maximum Cars Per Train: 8.
• Sheltered?: No
• On-Ride Photo Category: Non-Inverted Steel Coasters

Building an Air Powered Vertical Coaster

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster is a fairly one-dimensional coaster type with not very many track pieces. It only has one turn size and the only way it can move up or down are through vertical spikes of track. You need to be very careful at which speed you take these at, since these will increase the G forces quite tremendously. It is notably extremely difficult for the train to successfully crest the hill without it going fast enough to achieve the stat penalty for excessive negative vertical G forces. The low base Intensity Rating suggests that Chris Sawyer was well aware of this during development and opted to give players a buffer to prevent every coaster design from being too intense.

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster is infamous for how absurdly expensive it is to build. A single station piece costs $150.00 to build and a straight track piece costs $100.00 to build. The coaster is so expensive that this small ring of track consisting exclusively of 4 turn pieces costs over $1,500.00 to build.

To make up for this though, the Air Powered Vertical Coaster does not have a support cost or a support limit. You can build the ride as high as you want to, and the track pieces will always cost exactly the same amount of money.

Unless you're building something a bit unhinged, traditional designs with the coaster are also quite short in length. This means that while your track may be extremely expensive in relation to its size, it may not be very expensive compared to the total cost of your other coasters. For reference, the Wings of Apollo pre-built costs less than $10,000.00 to build.

The ride also features brakes as nearly every other coaster type does, however since the ride can only even exist in Powered Launch mode (without using cheats), it can only ever hold a single train. This means that brakes are entirely useless on this coaster type, and you should never use them unless you're going for a realistic design. As a result of only being able to use one train and needing a complete circuit, this makes the coaster type one of the most reliable in the game since it will never be possible for it to crash.

One of the most defining characteristics of the Air Powered Vertical Coaster is its speed. It has a powered launch that can be set to any speed in increments of 2 or 3mph (3 to 5km/h) from anywhere between 67mph (107km/h) and 112mph (180km/h), which is the highest launch speed in the game. You will likely need to play with the speed a little bit during ride testing as even a small increase in speed can suddenly cause the ride to crest the spikes at the top dramatically quicker. Ideally, the train should avoid cresting the spike at a speed faster than 25mph (40km/h).

The ride only has one stat requirement, which is that it needs to have a maximum drop height of at least 82ft (25m). This requirement is basically impossible to fail without doing so on purpose, as a hill consisting of the vertical crest, one single straight track piece, and the spike at the top, is enough to fulfill this requirement.

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster has three different vehicle types. The regular coaster trains were added in RCT1's Loopy Landscapes pack (along with the ride itself), the Boomerang Trains added in RCT2's Wacky Worlds expansion, and the Hot Rod Trains added in RCT2's Time Twister expansion. The difference between the three types are entirely cosmetic.

1.Standard Air Powered Vertical Coaster Trains
2. Boomerang Trains
3. Hot Rod Trains

Oddly, RCT1 allows you to build the Air Powered Vertical Coaster as a makeshift Reverse Freefall Coaster by only building the spike and not a full circuit. Vanilla RCT2 removes this functionality and now requires the coaster to be a full circuit. OpenRCT2 brings back the ability to build it as just the spike.

If you do this, remember to change the ride's operating mode from "Powered launch (passing station)" to "Powered launch (without passing station)".

Stats

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster is known for having some of the highest stats of any ride in the game. It has the second-highest base Excitement Rating of any ride in the game at 4.13 (beaten only by the Flying Coaster) and receives extremely high bonuses, notably its Excitement bonus from the BonusMaxSpeed value of 509,724. This means that as long as you don't fail the stat requirement and the ride isn't too intense, an Excitement Rating above 8.00 is basically guaranteed.

Speaking of the stat requirement, the Air Powered Vertical Coaster works a bit differently than other coaster types. Only its Excitement Rating is penalized instead of all ratings (a characteristic it shares with the Heartline Twister Coaster and the Multi-Dimension Coaster). If you fail its only stat requirement, its Excitement Rating will be divided by 4 whereas the other two ratings are unaffected.

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster and the Reverse Freefall Coaster are also the only rides in the game in which a rating other than the Excitement Rating has the highest contribution to its ticket price and the Park Value. In the case of both rides, the Intensity Rating does that instead. As such, these two rides, along with the Space Rings, are the only ones in the game in which the Excitement Rating does not have the highest effect on the ticket price and its Park Value contribution.

Since the Intensity Rating is unaffected by the stat requirement, this means that failing the stat requirement is not that big of a deal. The ride will still have a lower Intensity Rating due its lower G-forces due to the lack of a hill, but the decrease is not very significant. If we build Wings of Apollo without the spike, its Excitement Rating drops to 2.03 which is almost exactly 4 times as low, but its Intensity Rating has only dropped by about 19% from 8.90 to 7.27.

As a result of this, the ticket price doesn't generally take a huge hit by failing the stat requirement. Without failing the stat requirement, Wings of Apollo can have a ticket price of $20.00 for 40 months or 5-in game years (assuming it's the only Air Powered Vertical Coaster in the park). Nearly every scenario across both games takes either this long or less time to complete, so you can easily set it to the maximum ticket price and forget about it.

If you used this design without the spike, you can still charge over $17.00 for the first 5 months, and the price will always stay above $10.00 for entirety of those 5 years we talked about before. Because the spike is not there, the ride time has almost been cut in half.

Throughput & Profit

Despite only holding one single train, the Air Powered Vertical Coaster has a very strong throughput due to its extremely short ride time. This combines with its very high ticket price to make one of the most profitable rides in the game, even without trying to optimize everything.

Canyon Calamities is the only scenario in both games that starts with one of these coasters already in the park. The ride is horribly unoptimized, but even the ride entirely unchanged, it is still able to process over 2000 guests per hour, meaning that it would be able to amass over $40,000.00 per hour. You can't actually charge for the rides in that scenario, but a realistic design of the coaster will not be much different than this one, and thus, will be able to yield similar results.

Verdict

The Air Powered Vertical Coaster is one of the strongest coaster types in the game due to its high ticket price and fast throughput. This comes at the cost of the ride being rather bulky and impossible to build in tight spaces, and it's very one-dimensional, but the one thing that it does do is one that it does exceptionally well.