Will You Be Ripped Enough to Ride Rockit?
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Thursday April 23, 2009

The innovative new coaster coming to Universal Studios Florida, Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, will take interactivity to new heights by giving passengers the ability to control the musical soundtrack and create a take-home video memento of the ride experience. Anticipation has been building for the attraction, and, according to the Orlando Sentinel, Universal will have some unanticipated extra time to build more anticipation. Originally scheduled to launch in the spring, the Florida park now says that delays have pushed Rockit's opening date to late spring or early summer. To help keep the buzz buzzing, Universal has offered some new details about the coaster's elements.

As expected based on early renderings of the attraction, Universal has confirmed that the lift hill, all 167 feet of it, will be vertical. And the 90-degree ascent will chug along at 11 feet per second--not quite the perky pace of the elevator cable lifts found on rides such as Cedar Point's Millennium Force or Six Flags Great Adventure's El Toro, but perkier than the average chain lift.

After soaring down the first drop and reaching a top speed of 65 mph, Rockit will navigate what Universal is calling the Double Take, a 136-foot tall non-inverted loop. Barreling up the inside of the loop, the train will switch to the outside of the loop and keep passengers nominally upright just at the point when they would have been inverted. The process will be reversed when the train switches back to the inside of the loop before exiting the Double Take.

Among Rockit's other unique elements (and clever names): the Treble Clef, a section of track bent into the shape of the musical notation; the Jump Cut, a spiraling descent designed to deliver flutters of negative-Gs; the Crowd Surfer, a highly banked flyover atop the queue; Drop Tuning, a dive into an underground tunnel; and the Plot Twist , a final banked turn just before Rockit returns to the station.