Finally completed my Empress Marava (not Minerva!) Far Trader build in OpenSim. The Far Trader is one of the work-horses of the Traveller role-playing game.
The really neat thing is not so much the spacecraft (which I could go on detailing for ages) but what can happen outside it.
So you start on a barren planet:
You close the loading ramp on the empty landscape and head for the bridge.
You then head off into space. A touch of a button on the pilots console de-rezzes the world and rezzes the starscape in a 256m diameter sphere (ought to work on a suitable brown-out transition for take-off and landing). So the view out the window changes but more importantly if you don your EVA suit and walk out the airlock you now find:
(need to do a nice jump transition too!)
Then you head down to the starport. Again a touch of a button derezzes the stars and rezzes a whole spaceport ready for you.
I'll work up a few other environments but you get the drift. Quite apart from the role-playing side of this it also begins to make a nice vehicle for STEM based education.
Full image set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/burdenshaw/sets/72157626207815093/
