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Tail number B1566

Lieutenant-Colonel Bishop (source: wikipedia.com)In 1917, Canadian Fighter Ace, Billy Bishop, flew his Nieuport 17 in combat against German pilots, including an engagement with Manfred von Richthofen — the infamous “Red Baron”. By the end of the war, Bishop had shot down 72 enemy aircraft. Among Allied aces, he was second only to René Fonck, with 75.

My Nieuport 17 replica in progressAs a follow-up to my replica of the Airco DH.2, I am now working to create a virtual replica of Billy Bishop’s distinctive blue-nosed Nieuport 17, with Bishop’s tail number B1566. It has been a difficult task, as the Nieuport 17 shape is particularly hard to achieve in Second Life. Prims just can’t be cut, twisted, hollowed, and otherwise tortured into the precise shapes needed. It is close, though.

I’ll have to do more research to confirm the shade of blue for the nose cowl. As the story goes, after Bishop’s fifth kill, someone brought out a can of blue paint in defiance of official regulations, which prohibited the custom paint schemes that were common among German squadrons. I would assume that the blue they had on hand would be the same colour used for the insignia and tail. In some depictions that I found, the blue was much lighter.

During my search for reference photos, I also found “Mark Miller’s 3-D Nieuport” — a page of exquisite computer renderings of the Nieuport 17. Some of it may not be accurate, however. I notice that the upper wing structure in these renderings has no hinges, and photographs from the time clearly show that the Nieuport 17 had hinged ailerons. It’s a minor detail, I suppose, but it indicates that a certain amount of creative license was taken. Regardless, they greatly helped my understanding of the Nieuport 17’s internal structure.

My own Nieuport 17 will be complete in a few weeks. After I finish building and texturing the model, I begin work on the scripts that bring it to life. After that: testing, testing, more testing, and then a couple more rounds of testing.

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Now you can have your own Cubey Terra shop

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had many requests to install vendors at private airfields and skydiving facilities. So many, in fact, that I was unable to manage the network of vendors myself. It struck me that there had to be a better way to get my vendors out there.

Then… while I was in San Francisco at SLCC, someone gave a brilliant idea — give my vendors to people. Let someone else manage all the sales, and make sure that the vendor is up and running. In return, they’d get a cut of each sale. It seemed like a bright idea, but one that I kept procrastinating on, due to the complexities of supporting a network of vendors that are owned by other people.

To cut a long story short, I went ahead and built the vendor system and it has been in testing for weeks. It’s now ready to go live.

Here’s how it works: I supply you with the vendors. I can also provide kiosks, shops, hangars, and signs, if you need them. All you have to do is set them up and you have your own instant business. You get a cut of each sale, which is currently 10%. So for example, if you sell a L$1200 plane, you get L$120.

Naturally, you’ll earn more if you promote your shop with advertising and word-of-mouth. I’ll leave it up to you to work on the marketing side of things.

So, what I need are volunteers. I want aircraft enthusiasts and sales people. If you have a shop, you can add a Cubey Terra vendor. If you want to start your own business, I can provide everything you need (except the land) to get you started.

If you have a head for business and you want to try your hand at selling (arguably) the most popular skydiving gear and aircraft in Second Life, send me an instant message in-world and we’ll chat.

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Prim limit? I sneer at the prim limit!

If you have ever shopped around for a vehicle in Second Life, you may have noticed vehicles aren’t particularly detailed. They are generally simple shapes that rely on textures to add detail.

Why is that, you may ask? All Second Life objects are composed of linked primitives, or “prims” as they’re known to builders. Primitives are the basic building block of the virtual world. Builders will take cubes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and other prim types, and size, cut, hollow, twist, and generally torture them into various shapes before linking them to form the object they’re building. Everything you see in SL is made of them.

To make a vehicle move, SL needs to make the object become “physical” — it will have mass and velocity, and will be affected by gravity and collisions. Due to a limitation in the SL physics engine, no object that’s composed of more than 31 prims can use physics.

As if that wasn’t restrictive enough for vehicle makers, that limit includes any avatars that happen to be seated on the object, where each avatar counts as one prim. A vehicle with two seats, for example, can be made of no more than 29 prims, or it will exceed the prim limit. An eight-seat passenger plane can be made of no more than 23 prims. As a result, the prim limit is the bane of vehicle designers: it’s extremely difficult to achieve an attractive vehicle and stay under the prim limit.

Well, I say to heck with the prim limit. That’s right, I said to heck with it! And I mean it. I apologize if that offends some of my readers.

New Airco DH.2 high-prim plane

In development now is my replica of the Airco DH.2 — a British World War I warplane. The model itself is over 240 prims. And in total defiance of the prim limit, this baby flies.

That’s right… it flies. I have done an end-run around the prim limit. The DH.2 not only flies, but flies better than any plane in my inventory and is packed with features. It comes with a control panel HUD attachment with altimeter, speed indicator, and artificial horizon. The plane carries a Lewis gun that can be used in air-to-air combat with any other Cubey Terra aircraft. In flight, it’s responsive and agile, with enough realism in the flight model to perform stunts like rolls, loops, stalls, and more. Easy enough for a novice to fly, yet engaging even for a pro pilot.

In only a few days, you’ll find the Airco DH.2 with my collection of airplanes beside the runway at Abbotts Aerodrome, and you can expect more high-prim planes to emerge from my lab over the coming months.

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Building the airport OF THE FUTURE!

In the future, science doesn’t need to have a purpose — it just has to look cool. That’s my guiding principle in this latest retrofuturistic rebuild of Abbotts Aerodrome. That and rings. In the future, everything has rings!

Here are some snapshots of the progress so far.


The tower, under construction. Unlike real life, in SL you can build towers from the top down.


A view of Abbotts Aerodrome, looking northeast. The hangars will soon be rebuilt as well.


A closer view of the tower, looking southwest. For scale, you can see that there there’s a person standing on the walkway. The central structure is a little more than 100 meters in diameter, not including the walkways.


When you teleport to Abbotts, you arrive in this central plaza, located on the hilltop.


Inside the Research and Development building, there is a fine example of science that looks great, but has no purpose. Witness: THE SPINNING THINGS. I have no idea what they do, but boy do they look dangerous. If you can get past those, you can take the elevator a few hundred meters up to the R & D labs.