My friend Lily lives on a private island estate, and invited me out there one day to show me her place. Well, not only is her place a rather nice castle, it’s on rather a nice island too, and flying around it to have a look at the region including the islands nearby, I ran across something incredible: an enormous airship sitting next to someone’s house. I couldn’t have a really close look because it was on a parcel with an access list, but it looked pretty amazing through the mist.
I decided I really had to have one, although there was nowhere I could actually put it, and in particular no chance of finding room for the several hundred prims it surely required.
I did, however, do some searches on ‘airship’, ‘dirigible’ and so on, as a result discovering a wealth of flying machines of one kind or another, including a marvellous little pedal-powered blimp. But I never found that incredible thing – and not only that, neither Lily nor I could remember where we had actually been when I saw it.
Ultimately I gave up, until quite recently, when I was over in Lily’s area again and noticed there was some land for sale round the other end of her island. Lots of space, quite expensive, but double prims and a nice quiet residential island with no commercial developments (my area in Steinhauer was getting full of malls and casinos), protected land around each parcel, beach and waterfront space for all residents and lovely sunrises (or sunsets depending on which side of the island you’re on).
So I bought a parcel and put a new house on it, rather like my old one but bigger, again based on a stone-walled 18th century Cornish style building with large windows.
I also bought a hang glider and cruised around the area. As often happens when I fly around much, I got lost and ended up around some neighbouring island. And… there was the airship! This time I inspected it and got the creator’s name – TracyLynne Carpenter – and dropped her a line. She runs a cannon shop (The Cannon Company, East Kimberley (209, 31, 28)) specialising in recreations, in stunning detail, of cannons and similar weapons, and parked at the dock outside was this amazing thing. It cost more than my house but I couldn’t resist, and now I had the prims and the space to put it – the covenant on our island estate allows skyboxes above 250m.
You buy a little spiky mine-like thing and unpack it and inside is this little box. Then you stick the box where you want it and click on it, and from the menu select “Rez”… and your enormous airship assembles itself in front of your eyes. Wow. Of course I didn’t know all that when I started so I rezzed it at ground level – or started to – before I realised and de-rezzed it again. Next time I put the box down and sent it to 250m. And, of course, forgot that you can’t fly that high unaided.
One flight feather later, I was looking at this box in space, clicked “rez” a second time, stood (or rather flew) back and watched this Thing come together. In the wrong place.
It is big. Immediately the bits hanging off my land started to disappear. Ooops. Delete and start again. This time I popped the little box on the roof of my house, in the dead centre of the parcel, sent it to 250m, flew up there and rezzed again – and there it was:
Look carefully and you can see me standing on the top deck just aft of the bridge, to give you an idea of how huge this thing is. If you think it’s familiar, you’re probably right: it’s a painstakingly detailed rendering of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus from Jules Verne’s 2000 Leagues Under The Sea. With optional lifting bodies (you can buy the vessel with or without them) which are in fact hollow and, while black when looking from the outside in, are transparent from inside looking out. And the space inside is enormous. I really have to think what to do with it all: I am almost tempted to demolish the house and park the thing a few feet up over my land. Almost. I don’t quite want to be this industrial all the time.
The body of the Nautilus itself is fairly cramped in places however, and I had immense trouble getting teleportation devices installed so you could conveniently appear elsewhere in the vessel without banging your head or being unable to change the point of view. I have some nice little paired TP pads which are great and easy to set up, but they only go 66m in any direction so I needed a longer-range one to go up to the Nautilus from the ground.
After a lot of frustration I got it to work, however. I now have an enormous Victorian steampunk airship lurking 250m above my house, accessible only by TP or flight-feather from the ground. Some of my friends have their tree-houses, some their castles; I, on the other hand, have an enormous 19th-century airship from a parallel universe sitting in the sky over my house. Such are the beauties of SL.
