The girl you want

I wonder how many people will get that title.

Recently I became aware of the Syzygy Community, and their 'mainland tank convoy'. After watching the video I decided it looked like great fun, and after trying the demo for the particular model of tank they use, I wanted to join in.

If you're a regular reader you'll know I can't do anything without making an outfit for it. I knew it would include my 'Wind Dancer' hat from my Cyberpunk outfit, and after changing a few pieces around I settled on the Gravity outfit from my last post, with human skin, the Wind Dancer hat and the Eyepatch from LoveCats Ahoy!

I also added a grenade belt and a gun for effect. Over the course of writing this blog post, I've also created a few variations with different colour base layers. So far the red is my favourite.

I was pretty happy with my look, and since I was planning on exploring the mainland, which involves a lot of sim crossings, I needed to keep my script count down. This outfit succeeded there too, with the only script coming from the Firestorm Viewer Bridge (except for the cigarette I used as a prop in a few of the shots) - Those deletable resize scripts really come in handy.

Now, the tank in question - The Spyker Combat System Sabre Main Battle Tank (SCS Sabre MBT) is not cheap, in fact, at L$3000 it's quite expensive. But after going over it a few times, I decided to take the plunge and bought one of my own. One of the features is you can change the colours, and the texture files are full permission, so you can extract them and customise them yourself.

But before I got into that I wanted to play!

I decided to take a Tour of Route 12, which runs East to West on the Nautilus Continent, with a couple of spurs off to the south.

 Starting off in Rannveig things looked a bit run-down, a theme continued round the next bend where the skyline was dominated by the image of a 40 foot half naked woman advertising a strip show.

But of course this is the grid and next to it was a rather nice garden parcel.

I'm not gonna give commentary for the whole trip, the pictures can speak for themselves but there are a few highlights.

Crossing through Estruda I passed the parcel we used to live on, and I still regret leaving. Perhaps one day we'll return.

When you get the the far north west, the pavement gives way to a dirt track.

Off road is no problem, but there are certainly some tight spots that needed slow and steady driving, especially when they were bordered by no entry parcels.
And the occasional dead stop when a sim was restarting.

   

Of course no trip on the mainland roads is complete without encounters with AnneMarie O'Toole's bot cars.

At first I didn't mind them, they added a bit of flavour to the otherwise quiet roads, and I even decided to be helpfull and report any stuck ones I found. I even saw her come to deal with a tank that had got stuck on Linden land.

After a while though, I started to get a bit fed up of them. If she finds one on a no-entry parcel she just leaves it for the owner to return. She uses an alt for 'breakdown recovery' but they can obviously edit her items, so why not just return them if they're stuck?
That's not my biggest issue though. My problem is they are physical objects that drive like they are drunk.
I'll admit that my tank is quite wide, and on the narrower sections of road I accept I might need to pull over to the side and give way, but I can be approaching one on a nice wide section of road, and it will swerve across into me. Or even better, I stop to take a picture and all of a sudden I'm getting a proctological exam!

Don't get me wrong, I don't want them gone from the grid, but they could be a lot better. The 'pods' you see giving tours along the road seem to move much more smoothly and they're phantom too, so apart from the odd photobomb they cause no problems at all.

But thats enough whining from me.

After getting a copy of the Texture files I set to work creating a custom version. My first problem was actually figuring out what to do. I asked Imogen what she'd do, and it didn't take long for her to reply 'pink'.
So after running a few patterns past her,  I made a pink camouflage one:

 

That gave me the inspiration I needed. Red and black are my colours, so I looked at various red camo textures before settling on a digital pattern. I was feeling patriotic so I found a nice 'hand painted' Union Jack decal to add a finishing touch.

  

I'm really happy with my tank, I've been of a few little drives. Would be nicer if there were more actual people on the roads, but the same could be said about most of the grid, for now I'm looking forward to the next tank club cruise.

Oh and the reference in the title?