Ideas for crewed sailboats

I've been working on a new sloop (two sails) for some time now. Most of it's done, including the tricky rotations necessary for the curved genoa sail. I still have to work out the forces from the headsail, but compared to the f***ing spinnaker they should be gravy.

I'd like for passengers to be able to control some aspects of the sail deployment and trimming, especially if there are enough prims left over for a spinnaker. My initial idea is to have the owner grant sail controls to passengers by simply giving them a controller HUD (like Chase's pirate ship huds). One HUD would control the headsail, another would control the spinnaker, say. A fourth crewperson could navigate on long races, and would have their own radar HUD, or one of Static Sprocket's proposed GPS HUDs. In long-distance races, a team with plenty of practice and good communication skills would have a huge advantage over a single-handed boat, I believe. In addition, it would just be so much more fun for everyone.

Let me hear your own ideas for how a crewed sailboat might work in SL.

...my only real response is 'awesome; i can't wait'...

...i think it's important for HUDs to allow associated 'HUDlite's and keyboard control for each crewmember, if that's possible either through chat or other means - all-HUD controls are incredibly constricting from a usability perspective...i like the idea of having crew manning the various sails' trim, that's a given, and having another crew member with really wide situational awareness observing and calling ROW issues would me a huge plus, too, possibly the same person as the navigator...

...is there some way that the navigator could throw up waypoints, or at least select a heading which the helmsman could navigate toward visually?..it would be a tremendously useful feature if the navigator could say '270 degrees' and a red vertical line would be displayed at the appropriate bearing across the helmsman's hud (kind of faking a landmark)...i also think the sloop would be a great boat to premeire an integral stopwatch as part of the navigator's or helmsman's HUD...

...i think there should be some flexibility and overlap regarding crew positions - sail trim should be available to either the helmsman or navigator, in addition to dedicated personnel...

Heh. While learning how to use the spinnaker, I kept thinking about how much easier it would be if I didn't have to worry about it and had someone else take the controls. I can see a crewman for the spinnaker and navigation, but I hadn't thought about them controlling the headsail as I had no problem tacking and changing my sheet angle by myself back in the days of the Tako 2.

My initial thought on how it would work was also the same system Chase uses for his pirate ships. Only with, uh, smaller HUDs.

That's really all I can say about it, though, as I've never been on a sailboat, let alone one that had a crew.

It all sounds baisically good Kanker... the ideal situation would be to allow the owner to (optionally) give control of the foresail and spinnaker to one crew member, the mainsail to another, and keep the steering for themselves. If they only had one crew, then the person steering would probably want the mainsail. In RL sailing, this sort of division of duties is fairly common. On the upwind legs, the crew running the mainsail and spinaker spends most of their time looking for port startboard problems, and suggesting tactics to the skipper... so they probably want camer controls.

Off the wind the crew are a lot more busy keeping the sails trimmed properly. In any case, there has to be a lot of communication for crewed boats to work in SL or RL, so having some way to chat withing the boat without cluttering up all the other boat's chat/im would be very important. I suppose you would sail with an IM window open. The skipper would probably want to put some commands ("ready to come about" "hard a-lee", "ready to jibe", "jibe ho", "heading up", "bearing off", "sheet in", "ease sheet", "raise spinaker", "douse spinaker" on gestures so that the crew would have a clue about what the skipper wants to do next. That leaves only a few gestures for swearing at the crew and other boats... so this may be an issue.

I think most helmsmen would prefer control of the rudder AND the mainsail, since you want your turn to be perfectly synchronized with the mainsail trimming. But I would include the option of transferring mainsail trim to someone else.

Right now there is room for only four people on the sloop. I could add a fifth or sixth at the expense of aesthetics.

Intra-crew communications could be like this: the skipper says "\[CH#] PREPARE TO TACK" to the boat (not the crew), then the boat IMs each crewmember with that announcement. Using IMs in a script causes a delay, so announcements couldn't be rapid-fire.

Each crewmember should have the same camera controls as the helm.

Myrrh, I like your idea of some kind of heading indicator that shows up in the helmsman's field of view. Maybe Static's future GPS HUD thing could do something like this.

One thing that might be fun, especially in a sloop-rigged dinghy or catamaran would be to have the crew-person have some control over the heel-angle via a trapeze. A more upright sail produces more thrust, and most hulls perform best when they are more upright, so a good crewman out on the trapeze can really add a lot to a boat's performance. Plus the mouseview experience would be awesome at speed!

I think the usual delegation of roles: skipper- tiller and main; crew- all forward sails and hiking (with or without trapeze) would be my vote.

Of couse I don't know if you take heel angle into account now when calc-ing speed so this might make things too complicated.

Just an idea anyway.

The Tako is a gem Kanker, most fun in SL!

=glib=

Hrm, I might be able to do something like this. Right now I know I can force the built in Map interface to pop-up with a region and coordinates set, which if you then close the map interface it'll have the SL location beacon displayed.

I'll see what else I can get to display on-screen w/o poping up the map interface.


BTW - I'd really like to be able to assign someone else as backup, so that if I crash they can take over the ship.