It's very similar, but a bit smaller (and different colour obviously)

Honestly, a lot of the details don't show up at this scale. The model is, as usual, more detailed than it needs to be. The issue is getting shading right. I've had difficulty getting the fins to look good.

The catch car is fully modelled, but it had to be spit into four sprites to draw correctly. The sprites for those segments are all basically identical, so I will probably make them exactly the same and drop the small details, especially now that the catch car is behind the fins most of the time.

The brakes are eddy current brakes, applying a braking force proportional to the speed of the train. These are fixed brake fins with no active speed control, the train slows until the braking force balances the gravitational force pulling it down the slope (which is why the brake run is sloped).

These rides generally don't feature friction brakes at all - they use a combination of fixed and moving magnetic brake fins and drive tires for the blocks - and I'm wondering if this ride should even get the normal brake pieces. It might be confusing if I call this piece "magnetic brake" if the regular brakes are also magnetic just with less realistic behaviour, but I do think it's worth having this special piece for this ride type, as they very commonly feature this type of brake run, and those brake runs are usually hit at speed so too sharp a deceleration looks bad.

Technically, the standard brake piece in game does also works like a magnetic brake, in that the braking force is proportional to speed - except that the force constant is so high that the train will very rapidly decelerate to the brake's speed setting, and getting a smooth deceleration requires you to fiddle with the speed settings individually. This piece is meant to provide a smoother, more realistic braking force.

The ride rating calculation has not been implemented for this ride type yet, so the ratings aren't really meaningful - they are currently calculated as if it were a single rail coaster. Nonetheless, they are: 7.52 excitement, 7.29 intensity, and 3.81 nausea.

Of all the rides I did not finish, this one has had the most development, but it would still take substantial effort to finish especially since it would now need the diagonal sloped turns as well.

Yes, the pipeline coaster was a ride that Arrow was working on in the early 90s. Only a short prototype layout was built. One was considered for Alton Towers, but John Wardley did not like the ride and decided to go with a B&M invert instead.

It's a bit confusing ... it seems you can see content posted on other instances but you can't reply unless you have an account on that instance. It seems like separate instances are still functionally separate services, the communication is one way. And it appears that different instances can contain identically named communites that are entirely separate. If you go to https://sopuli.xyz/c/rctit doesn't have the posts from this one.

It seems like this community is still hosted on this particular instance only, posting requires an account on this instance, and if this particular instance goes down the community would cease to exist. If that's the case, it's only marginally better than a single server for everything, IMO.

It kind of reminds me of how Usenet worked, but it seems worse. I never used it, but I'm pretty sure Usenet allowed people to post to any newsgroup their server carried, and I don't think Usenet newsgroups belong to a particular server - if dropped by one server they would continue to exist as long as other servers carry them.