They just need to refrain from saying "Ride", because the ride portion I believe from what I've been told is about 4:15. The entire experience is 15 minutes yes and once you hit the first pre show you're done with the queue and are off and running. No more switchbacks, waiting, or anything like that. You're "on the ride" on that point. They should just be painting Rise as the ultimate Star Wars experience and not a ride cause honestly, this is much much more than just a ride. The ride will be the best part but trust me folks, tons of sh!t going on here. Gonna be worth the wait for it.
That might be the plan but knowing industrial engineering that just doesn’t sound possible from a guest flow perspective.
The problem with a "continuous experience" structure that goes from a pre-show, walking to one RV (transport shuttle), then walking to another RV (actual ride), is the variables in guest movement speed. It makes it extremely difficult to accurately predict how long each "section" can last. In a perfect world, a group of fifteen guests (two, eight-person RVs) will all walk briskly from one stage to the next at the same pace. But that won't happen. There will be stragglers, and a walk that takes one group 45 seconds can take another group 3 minutes--no matter how hard Ride Ops tries to hurry them.
Now, that can kinda be alleviated with multiple pre-show rooms/transport shuttles/loading stations, but a lot is still relying on the guests' willingness to play along with ride efficiency. The only way to really "ensure" everything is cleared out in advance for a group is to have stages prior to the actual ride (pre-show/transport) take enough time to get everybody ahead of them on the ride proper (so, five minutes each stage). You can't have too many pre-shows/transports or else you overload the time you have with people, so I'd hazard there's only two available.
Playing with the calculations - the ride is 4 minutes and the whole experience is 14 then pre-ride is 11 minutes. Let's go with an even split of 3:20 each for pre-show, transport, and combined walking and LOADING between the three stages. It may not be right, but "feels" right in my gut.
That 3:20 walk/load time is the interesting one, because it's actually 1:40 to the shuttle transport and the ride. I have a hunch the opening scene with the Storm Troopers is going to cause a massive hold-up on a very narrow amount of time.
If they alternate groups through the experience, then groups are moving every 1:40. It's a good amount of time to load a small pre-show room, but requires rushing and assumes there's no back-up ahead of the line. It's going to require a gap until efficiency is peaked, so doubling the time to 3 min between initiating each pre-show seems prudent to begin with.
Now, here's a quirk - If they're alternating between two pre-shows/transport shuttles, then that's only allowing 1,100 guests an hour. That means that, yep, they have to run four pre-shows in order to support 2k an hour.
That means cutting the walk/load time in half. Which requires the guests to along even more.
This is going to be fascinating.