Wrestling with Reality: Aesthetic Flight

When you are designing a vehicle for artistic purposes, whether it be SL, a video game, or even a shortstory, you are faced with a problem engineers don't have: you don't have Physics there to proof and pass judgement on your work.

Sure, you don't have to worry about shearing point or strength to weight ratios. Nor are you encumbered by vibration, lift/drag coefficients, or pesky things like labor and materials handling. You don't have to even consider how it is fueled or how electrical system are run unless you choose to make a point to do so. You can do as you like, so long as you are not abusing the audience's expectations.

This is not to say you should be bound by the constraints of reality as-we-know-it. In fact, the further you get into the abstract, the easier it becomes as the viewer/reader/player is more willing to take what is presented to them at face value. Even then, however, you must remain internally consistent.

There is a peculiar hardcore of SL users who enjoy modeling and scripting all manner of flying things. Looking at who is building what, you come to see that those vehicles that are most enjoyable are those that work to make the Appearance of Form match the Appearance of Function. Sure, All you really need for a vehicle in SL is a prim and a script, but that isn't enough to satisfy what people want.

(We who create vehicles are the largest portion of the vehicle market, all buying one another's creations. This is largely because there are many SL users that don't get it. It is a common refrain I hear, a murmur of "Why would you want a vehicle when you could just fly?" This is a topic for another day)

The best designs try to marry the form of the craft and the handling, reinforcing what the tool-using portion of the brain expects. When it doesn't the user experience is less than satisfying. However, if it succeeds, that vehicle will become somebody's favorite.