Is This Vehicle Possible?

I'm trying to make a starfighter type of vehicle that should use mouselook to steer, set the forward velocity by tapping forward and reverse, barrel roll with left and right, launch with up and land with down. Also a limit on how fast it can turn, even though mouselook is being used.

And future plans are to have a "robot controlled" flight mode but for right now I just want something I can fly.

Also I'm having problems looking up how to set what part is the seat and how to face and change the character animation (I'll be creating my own pose with Poser in the end). I wish there was an actual tutorial that walked someone through creating a vehicle and described what each step is doing.

Make the vehicle face East, with zero for all it's rotation values. Have the seat face East as well, so the avatar faces east when sitting. Make sure the root prim is roughly in the middle of the vehicle.

Problem is being a starfighter I won't be sitting on top of it, I'll be seated inside of it covered by a (rather elaborate) canopy.

Why is that a problem? I've made a aeroplane with a pilot seat buried inside the plane's canopy. Yes it does get tricky selecting it and linking it in the right order. For my plane I initially linked it all together then separated the parts, relinked in the right order, to get the pilot and passenger seats right as required.

You do know about Cubey Terra's DIY plane kit available for a low price at his airport? I found that very helpful.

"A low price" being free

I have since figured out the seat problem using a function call in the seat. However I have a new problem. Once I built the fuselage around it and the canopy, when I try to "sit here" the sim crashes! And it's not even a physics-enabled object. I wonder, given that I have several prims attached to myself, could I be exceeding some kind of max-prim-link amount when I seat myself?

CORRECTION

The sim is not crashing, but it's causing me to lose my connection to the server.

Hmmm.
Share your object with several trusted friends and see if they experience the same difficutly.
There are some primtives which will go crazy in SL. You have one of these prims in your craft.

Well I'll tell you. I started over on it and I got the cockpit working fine, I could res, link, unlink, sit on, and get up from it with no problems. Then I built the wings out of all box shapes. If I so much as select everything my connection bombs, every single time. And it happens to be every single time before I can link all the individual objects together.

I'm getting pretty frustrated here. I want a friggin ETA-2 Actis Interceptor already!

I really don't understand it. I have a 6 MB/768 KB cable connection but every single time I select the ship that very moment my connection to the server craps out. But I can still stream music, look around, select objects, etc...

And if I don't figure out somethign quick all the individual pieces are gonna be returned to my lost and found folder.

I get this when testing my ships out too.
Also when I go back and forth between objects without leaving edit mode too much. The minimap goes red.
I've learned to work around those bugs and use alternative prims but it would be nice to have that fixed.
I'm afraid I made far too many bug reports so they don't pay attention to mine anymore.

What I do for vehicles with a canopy is this (assuming the canopy is a hollowed out cut sphere):

- change the cut on the canopy to make it almost completely open, but still visible
- do my editing
- link the whole thing together, selecting the seats last
- go into "Edit Linked Parts" mode, and select the canopy
- adjust the cut parameter to be correct

And you're done...

- Jon

Well long story short I've gotten it to work after a fassion. I wasn't aware of the 30 prim limit so I ended up using that spiffy nonphy 3 group of scripts.

But wanting to play around with physics I made another craft that came out to exactly 30 prims and I'm now sturggling with that