Airship project bottleneck

The problem is I can't figure out how to build the thing so that a large part of the gondola is inside the balloon section. From outside, the bridge/observation deck would be visible, living quarters located in the upper deck. Just like in RL, the aft half of the balloon would taper more than the fore half.

(I do have megaprims.)

The effect can be crudely replicated with a 40x20x20 sphere dimpled down to 20m long, a 10x20 cylinder cut away partly to allow access between the two decks, and a 60x20x20 sphere dimpled down to 30m long. Thing is, there's ugly seams between spheres and cylinder. At a distance the seams get bigger, and the cylinder reflects the sunlight differently than the spheres.

One thought was to make the balloon out of 3 sculpties - one for the top 85% of the balloon, one each for lower fore aft, leaving a gap where the upper gondola deck goes. The upper deck would expand to slightly more than the width of the section of balloon that would normally be there. Seams would be horizontal, and could be camouflaged with a texture that simulates the way fabric forms around the horizontal girders of a real airship. But designing the prims to fit properly may be too difficult.

Is it possible to make a multiprim object with one of its prims phantom? Making the balloon part phantom (from a single sculpty to get the desired shape) would be the easiest way to make passage between the gondola decks possible. I've tried, but if there's a way I'm not hitting the right keys.

Any ideas?

there's a script on the LSL Portal that makes a child phantom, but it may be easier to just make a multi object airship that uses scripted movement instead.

Check the relative rotations of the megaprim parts that make the ends and body of the gas bag.

When joining a hemisphere to a cylinder, at any scale, megaprims or not, you need to remember that SL approximates the shapes with faceted polygons. A cylinder is a series of flat rectangular faces, with something like 16 or 32 facets around the circumference. A sphere has the same number of facets. But if the sphere and cylinder don't match in rotation, the facets don't align, and you get a very obvious seam that catches the light easily. With megaprims, this becomes even more obvious, since he exposed flats on the mis-matched facets are much larger.



So... try rotating the end pieces on the long axis of that airbag, and see if you can get the facets to align better.

I think I'll go with the phantom child script. Next task will be to do the gasbag sculpty. I've already for a single sculpty for the fins.

See this post for a script that will make a linked child sculpted prim a phantom prim, while the rest is normal.

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