Just like the human body, Second Life is over 60% water. Well I don’t actually know the exact percentage, but there really is a lot of water in SL, and very few places to land a plane. Unless, of course, you have pontoons.
The new Terra Tachyon M. Yes! Those pontoons are sculpted prims!
As it turns out, it’s no simple matter to make a float plane, which is why I hadn’t tried it before and why there are so few float planes in SL already. In real life, if you bolt a couple of gigantic pontoons to almost anything, it’ll float. In Second Life, it’s a little more complicated — nothing will float unless it’s specifically scripted to simulate floating. SL water has no physical substance, which is why most planes seem to fly in and out of water as if it weren’t there at all.
The Tachyon M gets the current water height (using the handy llWater function in LSL), and uses that to transition smoothly to a floating state during a water landing, giving all the appearances of floating on the water’s surface. Taking off from the water is just as easy — open the throttle, accelerate to take-off speed, and the Tachyon M practically leaps into the air.
Besides the floating trick, the Tachyon M is identical to its land-based twin. To test fly a Tachyon, visit the main hangar at Abbotts Aerodrome.