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

I think this issue could be addressed on the front end.

The reason you would want a server that is federated with everything is so you can access all content at once instead of switching between accounts on different instances. If you could log into multiple instances at once with a single username and see content from both in the same feed it wouldn’t matter if they are defederated. I think this federation thing ought to be, as far as possible, transparent to the end user.

The way this currently works feels odd to me - it doesn’t really behave like a decentralised Reddit, because your account is tied to a specific instance and the content you see depends on which instance you pick. It feels like an awkward middle ground between a centralized service like Reddit and just having a completely separate forum site for each community.

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.

It’s not a weird base, it’s really the most natural base to choose, which is why it’s called the natural logarithm. It doesn’t particularly matter what base you choose, because you can always convert from one base to another, but often the natural logarithm is simpler to work with. For example, the derivative of ln(x) is just 1/x. The derivative of log10(x) is 1/(x*ln(10)).

This is because ln(x) is the inverse of e^x, which has the unique property that it is its own derivative.

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.