Kai’s Sky Masters – Legoland Japan

About This Project

Legoland Japan in Nagoya opened its doors on April 1, 2017 after three years in the planning. It is the first Legoland park in Japan and extends their presence in Asia after Legoland Malaysia Resort. The park was projected to attract over two million visitors annually.

The park is divided into eight different zones which include Factory, Bricktopia, Pirate Shores, Knight’s Kingdom, Adventure, Lego City, Lego Ninjago World and Miniland.

Miniland as a theme is common to all of the eight parks worldwide and is a recreation of some of the most famous architecture in Japan made from Lego bricks. Three notable creations are Tokyo Station, Tokyo Tower and Nagoya Castle. More than 10,000,000 individual pieces goes into the making of these miniature masterpieces.

The park has been designed for families with children aged 2-12 years. From its initial opening, it has grown quickly and there are now over 40 rides and attractions, so it has easily become a full day attraction.

Having built the successful Vroomster Ride at Cbeebies Land within Alton Towers, we were approached by Merlin Entertainments to create a Lego Ninjago themed ride for their Legoland park in Japan. The flexibility of our QuadStar ride system ensured that the change from eight arms to six and a totally different car at the end of the moving arm, prevented no challenges at all for our design and engineering team.

Ride Concept

The finished design specified six cars, each of which carry up to four passengers. Because of the target age for the park, the ride has been designed to carry passengers as small as 0.9m with full safety containment for all. There is a joystick to control the cars height, up to 3.4m.

The ride, called Kai’s Sky Masters was designed and built in-house by the Garmendale Engineering team and completed in just under nine months. It is an aerial roundabout, complete with interactive targets and shooting game.

The front passenger pilots have individual gimbal-mounted cannons to shoot at the 30 individual and interactive targets around the 16m boundary of the ride. When a target is hit by the rider they receive audible feedback and their score is kept.

Legoland is a family park and the idea is that good teamwork by the family and shooting accuracy by the pilots, will result in more points and the win!

The system stores the high scores for the day, week or even year. These can be displayed for all to see. As you can imagine, the competition is fierce. This level of interactivity is unique and adds a whole new layer of fun, to an already great, family ride.

The cars and surrounding scenery are fully themed with the Lego Ninjago characters and named after Kai. If you didn’t already know, Kai is the Fire Ninja. One of the six Ninja trained by Master Wu in the 2017 LEGO Ninjago Movie. The cars and theming were developed jointly with the Merlin Entertainments creative team.

Build Process

The ride was built by our own engineers in our Derbyshire, UK factory.

 

Ride Installation

Working with their own local teams, the ride was installed by Garmendale Engineers.

Accreditations & Associations