As a result of expanding my selection of SL aircraft with a Beechcraft C90 and C33, both from DSA (I’ve really got this SL flying bug rather bad!), I decided I wanted to have one or other of them rezzed and ready to go at my little home island; after all, what’s the point of having something like an aeroplane (or a boat – or two for that matter) if you’ve constantly got to pull it out of your purse / suitcase / handbag / attaché case (or however you think of your inventory) to use it, when you have the space to show it off?
Truth be told, I’ve actually had an on-and-off nagging issue with the design of my little island for a while now. As regular readers may know, part of the island has been laid out to provide a stand for my PBY-6A Catalina, with a south-facing ramp to provide access to the water for take-offs. The problem here has been that the ramp led into what is pretty much a main navigation channel, while at the same time made the southern end of the parcel pretty much unusable.
Given this, I’d been thinking of re-arranging things for a while, but until the arrival of my new toys, I didn’t really have the motivation to get on with it. However, that I had been thinking of things did give me a loose idea of what I wanted to do before I started pulling things apart and gluing them back together.
First off, the Catalina stand and ramp got rotated through 90-degrees. This required a certain amount of fiddling, as the parcel is fairly narrow, so I had to spend time cutting and rotating and generally faffing with a prim to get a ramp that fit within the parcel boundary, didn’t cut too deeply into the land and which wasn’t so ridiculously steep the Catalina wouldn’t be able to climb it without grounding the hull and getting stuck.
Once done, this freed-up the southern end of the island so I could make better use of that end of the parcel. As a result, and without dragging this all out, I’ve been able to add moorings for one of the additional ‘planes (which will be the C33 Debonair by default) and a place where visitors can moor their boats without a lot of additional faffing around on my part and hanging things in the air to make space for them. The move gave also me the opportunity to widen the water basin between the north and south sides of the island, providing additional mooring space there, if needed.
An unexpected outcome of this work was a reduction in the overall LI of all the structural elements on the south end of the island; not by a lot, but enough to allow me to add to the garden while still keeping a very decent ceiling of “free” capacity on the land. At the moment I’m thinking of adding a screen of small trees to visibly separate house & gardens from my budding “airport”, to give the former a greater feeling of privacy on those days when flying and boating aren’t that important.
So am I happy with the outcome? Overall, yes. At least until the next time the urge to glue prims together and play with mesh comes over me :).
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 