Quite true on both counts.
For them as don't know, in PC you can change the exit speed of all brakes up to 60mph, so as long as the coaster is going no faster than that (which it won't be if you put the brakes on top of a hill), the coaster won't slow down at all. Then all you get is a division in the track allowing you to run another train.
But on the friction issue, it seems to me that friction is overdone to try to compensate for essentially no other physics. Friction should really vary with G force (G force being what creates friction in the 1st place). IOW, a coaster should slow down more through a 4G turn than a 1G turn because there's more force grinding the wheels into the track and such. Also, if the coaster cars spin or swing, the coaster should slow down more as some of its forward momentum gets turned into angular momentum. And to carry this on further, friction should also be different for each wheel on the coaster, because each wheel crosses the same spot of the track at a different speed as the train goes by, and it's the speed which makes the G forces and thus the friction.
But this doesn't seem to happen. Instead, coaster speed only seems to be a function of the height and steepness of the drop less a constant amount of friction applied continuously during the run. Different types of coasters seem to have their own friction values, so that they get more or less speed out of the same drop (with roughly the same mass for the cars). But really, they all work the same, like they left the parking brake on.
OK, I can understand faking coaster dynamics with a simple system. Doing it realistically would use a lot of CPU time crunching lots of numbers over and over, and we already know the game is CPU-limited keep track of thousands of peeps constantly changing their minds. But if this is how things really are, then friction would essentially be just a single number, so tweaking it a bit, even on a coaster-by-coaster basis, should be a matter of a few key strokes. The devil would be in decided what to change the value to. But hey, Frontier trying to reproduce a real coaster should be a good clue in that direction
.Of course, that's only important to people who actually want to recreate real coasters. If that's not your thing, this whole coaster friction thing seems silly because you have no point of reference to compare your PC coasters to.
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