Knott’s Berry Farm announced Windseeker for 2011 early this morning to its Facebook fan page.  In line with rumors we had previously posted here on Westcoaster, the ride will take the place of the 34 year old Sky Cabin tower.

The details on Windseeker are rather impressive…

301 feet tall
64 seats on 32 dual-seated arms
Arms swing out 110 feet during the ride sequence
8 rotations a minute
Ride sequence is expected to run 60 seconds (once at the top of the tower, overall ride time is 3 minutes)
And yes, the “K” will return to the top of this tower as well.

The ride will carry a 48″ height requirement and is expected to be open for the 2011 summer season.

Several other Cedar Fair parks have announced identical attractions, only Cedar Point is yet to announce their version of the ride.  Rumor is this ride will be taller and will likely carry the previously rumored StratoSoar name.

Knott’s Berry Farm’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts announced today that the new ride (rumored to be a Mondial Wind Seeker), will have riders flying higher than Supreme Scream’s drop height.

Simply put, this would put the ride in the 250-350 foot tall range.  The official drop height of Supreme Scream is 252 feet, the ride’s overall advertised height is 312 feet.  Which definitely lends credence to the idea that Cedar Point’s ride could possibly still end up being close to 400 feet tall.

Cedar Point is set to announce their ride on Tuesday, August 24th at 2pm.

If you haven’t read part 1 of this whole development, click here to read: “What is Knott’s up to?”

After our post yesterday it seemed a flood of info started coming in about all sorts of fun in store for Knott’s.  Some legit, some… maybe not so much.  While 2012 is a still a ways off, I am hearing that we’ll see movement on that sooner rather than later.  But that’s a whole other story.

What is on everyone’s mind is after Knott’s teased on their Twitter and Facebook accounts about 2011, everyone started speculating and tossing rumors around.  Let’s just look at a few of them that popped up more than once from very random, yet seemingly well informed sources.

Cedar Point’s worst kept secret is the Star Flyer… but it might not be a Star Flyer from Funtime.  Instead, according to this article, it seems they’ve contracted Mondial to build one of their new Wind Seeker attractions.  Basically the ride is the same concept as the Star Flyer, only instead of attaching the seats to the ride with chains, this one uses arms.  This allows the ride to operate in higher wind conditions than the original Star Flyer.  Read More

“It’s coming in 2011… our fans will find out here first!”

With that, Knott’s Berry Farm has opened the rumor gates on their next project.

Something that we at Westcoaster have been monitoring for quite some time (as you might know from our updates).  While we love to joke around and tease about things, one thing we do take seriously is the competition between the local parks.

The next few years is going to be insanely busy around the local parks and resorts.  Let’s just break things down a bit…

Disneyland – Star Tours 2 (2011)
Disney California Adventure – Little Mermaid (2011), Carsland… 3 attractions (2012), Buena Vista Street (2012)
Universal Studios Hollywood – Transformers (Late 2011/Early 2012)
Six Flags Magic Mountain – Superman redo… rumored to be Bizarro (2011), Vekoma Roller Skater (2011) and we’ve heard rumblings of another big ride potentially in 2012.

So where does this leave Knott’s?  High and dry if they don’t do anything, that’s where!
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Hello world,

How’ve you been?  Good to see you back here, reading what I have to write.  So, where we last left off, our rag tag bunch of hack designers (read: Me and Drew) were tossing some ideas around about where things will go moving on into the future.  A few decisions were made.  I ate a Snickers bar.  Something something In ‘n’ Out, bacon, something something.  Oh yeah! I remember now.  Let’s take a look at what’s happened since we last spoke!

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