Maiden Flight!

One certain project was keeping me busy over the last weeks - well with some interruptions due to lack of motivation, changes in design and ideas for other things which were much faster to realize keeping popping up.
It's always a special moment for me when a larger construction is completed. Well "completed" - let's say when you finally see results. There is still some work to do at it but its down to some minor tweaking and experimenting with things and playing with design details really.
A build is never actually completed. You just give up at some point ;-) However, the closer you get to this perfect idea you have in your head, the better - and I'm am very pleased with...

The first Drow Science Steampunk Zeppelin!

There is always this level of uncertainity you feel when uploading the mesh the first time. Are your estimations about its land impact correct? (A crucial point to me. Especially with bigger objects: I want to avoid cluttering places with unnecessary large primcounts) Are there any things  I have missed? Any design flaws? Or does the cool and beautiful model in blender looks just ugly and disproportioned when putting your av in it?

Luckily I could answer all these questions to my satisfaction. It has a decently low land impact of 48 prims (at an overall length of more than 50 meters), it looks light and elegant and simply - right :-)

I wanted to make this ship for a long time already. A whimsical, sleek design. Totally fictional of course, but still: its quite believable that a construction like this would actually work!
It is a piece of alternate history, where steam engines learned to fly - even if you had to hang them from large gas balloons!

Friday evening saw its maiden flight. I invited some friends over and took off from the airfield at Foliage.
It was a lovely and quite extensive tour: We did head west to Crow's Nest, had a trip down south to the St. Diabloux Airport, went to Grand Manan Island and Sailor's Cove and even had a trip to Second Norway in the far east before landing at Honah Lee Surf.

Low-level cruising over a calm Blake Sea (Courtesy of Cyhtleen)

Stopping by at Crow's Nest

Drow skipper Somehow steering into the Sunset (Courtesy of Cyhtleen)

Most ships in Second Norway float in the water - some(s) fly!

The next days will see further test-runs, some tweakings and trying one or two ideas to make it even better (hard to believe, I know!), before it will be available at my store.

Oh, and before I forget: there is one thing I definitely need to fix before it goes into serial-production:

It still has no name!

I will fix this flaw - promised! Deadalus sounds not bad for example... feel free to give me feedback :-)