Welcome to our most recent ride. The brand new Lego Ninjago themed ride, designed, built and installed for Legoland in Japan. 

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, is built on our super-flexible QuadStar platform – the same as was used for the Vroomster Ride within CBeebies Land at Alton Towers, UK.

There are six cars, each of which carry up to four passengers. It 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 concept for the cars is simple

The front passenger pilots also 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. Good family teamwork and shooting accuracy by the pilots, will result in more points and the win! The high scores for the day, week or even year can be displayed, so the competition is fierce. This level of interactivity is unique and adds a whole new layer of fun, to an already great, family ride.

You can see the build of the ride here

The cars and surrounding scenery are heavily themed with the Lego Ninjago characters and named after Kai. The cars and theming were developed jointly with the Merlin Entertainments creative team. 

Here’s the ride being installed

And in case you didn’t know, Kai is the Fire Ninja. One of the six Ninja trained by Master Wu in the 2017 LEGO Ninjago Movie. 

The ride is now live in the Japan park and welcoming visitors. You can see it here.

David Shelmerdine, our Managing Director talking about the project said.

“When we designed the QuadStar system we allowed for loads of flexibility in the theming and whilst the underpinnings are the same as the Vroomster ride at CBeebies Land, the theming and the interactivity of the cannons for the pilots are totally different. The design and build for this was very straightforward as there was so much in common with the previous model. It’s great for us that our investment in the ride systems is delivering so strongly and proof that British Engineering is still much in demand across the world.”

Kelvin Ensor, Sales Director of Garmendale also commented.

“This is the first job we’ve delivered for Legoland Japan and what could have been a real challenging project has been delivered remarkably smoothly. With our engineers leading a local team to install and commission the ride, over in Japan, it was almost entirely trouble-free and it’s now running beautifully in the park. We have even more new rides coming through our pipeline at the moment and the period of growth for the business is great news for the business and the region.”

You can see more of the ride running here

Thanks to our friends at Life Designs Japan for the concept image. You can see their full article about the new Lego Ninjago World here.