I posted my review of Hyperia a few pages back, noting how, for a hypercoaster, it felt a short and 'incomplete experience'. I’ve subsequently wondered whether that’s just my reaction to it, or whether it factually is an outlier in terms of roller coaster design! Not that any of this matters
, but I found the results quite interesting and worth sharing! :-
I've considered every currently-operating coaster listed on RCDB that’s 200ft tall or higher, which is a ‘traditional’ gravity hypercoaster (ie. gets pulled up a big (chain lift) hill then released - basically I excluded Launch coasters!). I also discounted B&M Dive coasters, as the design of those is generally very specific as a Dive Machine, and certainly different compared with normal hyper coasters. That leaves 44 'traditional’ hyper coasters.
Of those,
Hyperia is the shortest in terms of track length.
Perhaps not a fair measure? - there are of course some 300+ft coasters amongst those 44, and those will obviously have a much longer track length than Hyperia. So I looked at
the ratio of ‘length vs height’ - ie. how long one of these hypercoasters is in relation to its height.
The average ‘length vs. height’ ratio for these 44 coasters is 21.8 - ie. the average hypercoaster will have a length that’s 21.8 times its height.
Looking at this ratio,
Hyperia is second bottom (only to the city-based coaster, Thunder Dolphin), with a ratio of 13.8 - its length is 13.8 times its height.
This is well under the 21.8 average - if it conformed to that, for its 236ft height, you’d ‘expect’ its track length to be 5145ft. Hyperia is only 3266ft long. So it’d need nearly another ~1900ft of track to be of average ‘expected’ length.
1900ft is 55-60% of its current 3266ft track length, and given a lot of that existing track is lift hill, brakes and station, then, yep, adding 1900ft would probably get you double the ride time between the top of the lift hill and hitting the brakes.
So, TLDR, for those saying they feel like Hyperia is missing the second half of its layout, well, based on the average, ‘normal’ lift-hill based hyper coaster design, you’d be bang on! Hyperia is an outlier. Of course, its elements are quite unique for a hypercoaster - so you win some, lose some! Perhaps it’s better to think of Hyperia not as a traditional hyper coaster, but instead a cross between a hypercoaster and Dive Coaster, with some RMC-esque elements!