Over the last few days, I’ve worked on an upgrade to the old drop ship. I’m sure you’ve seen it around — it’s the twin-hulled, seven-seat skydiving ship. As usualy, I added a few new features, like the ability to land at high speed after dropping skydivers at high altitude. That seemed like a good feature after going 4 kilometers up in seconds, then finding myself stranded up there with nothing but regular thrust to get back down.
It also has a slightly redesigned model. The pilot now sits in a centrally-located cockpit instead of the left-hand pod, and it’s more compact in general.
The biggest question on my mind is this: what’s it called? When I made it in 2004, I just called it the “drop ship”. No name, just… “drop ship”. But that doesn’t seem right. After all, my other vehicles have names, so why shouldn’t this one? I thought about “Icarus” after the ancient Greek guy who flew too close to the sun and burned his wings. But since Icarus fell to his death in that incident, I think maybe a more positive name might be appropriate.
I considered naming it H.A.L.O., a military acronym that stands for High-Alititude, Low-Orbit, but when you consider that no SL vehicle can go any higher than 4096 meters, it didn’t seem very much like “low orbit”.
In the end, I took my cue from Sony. I’m calling it the DS3. Drop Ship version 3. It’s sort of a name, isn’t it?