It is an idea of the Carnival Cruise company, which has mounted them on a huge ship that will open in a few months.
On its next cruise ship, which will be inaugurated in the summer, the American company Carnival Cruise has had a roller coaster installed. This is the first time that a large company has attempted something like this, which on paper also seems rather dangerous: in fact, the company has assured the Wall Street Journal that the system will be safe and that it will guarantee a remarkable experience. “It will be like flying over the sea,” explained Marco Hartwig, project manager of the German company Maurer, which will supply the roller coaster to Carnival Cruise.
The idea to assemble the roller coaster comes from the need to equip the new ships with more and more varied attractions, to intercept a stratified public ranging from families to young couples. “It’s hard for us to compete with the attractions on the ground,” explained Carnival Cruise Vice President Ben Clement. It is also for this reason that the Mardi Gras, the ship on which the roller coaster will be mounted, will also have a basketball court and a miniature golf course on board.
However, building a roller coaster on board a ship has even more complications than usual. An excessively high structure would have compromised the stability of the ship, and the exact composition of the forces that would act on the trolleys, including the unpredictable wind, as well as the resistance of the metal components to corrosive seawater, had to be studied.
The final model predicts that the structure will be slightly less high than the overall structure of the ship – which is enormous, as long as three football pitches – and that it will be a bit lower than the roller coasters we are used to frequent in theme parks. It will be half the height of a standard structure, and a full-ride will last between 20 and 30 seconds. Not to mention the wagons, which will be different from the normal ones: each one will be able to carry only two people at a time and will be driven by its own electric motor; a detail that has made it possible to eliminate hooks and noisy chains normally used to climb the trolleys along the slopes of traditional roller coasters.
As the functional Cruise Hive website has written, the Mardi Gras was built in Finland and will be inaugurated on August 31 with a cruise from Copenhagen, Denmark, to New York, USA. It will then be used on routes to the islands in the Caribbean.
