Coming Soon from Grid.Living: The Digeridoo Steamworks Clocktower Limited Edition

I've been tooling around the last week or so working on a new kind of style of building. Well, not so much new for everyone else, but new for me. For years I've wanted to try my hand at the art style known as Steampunk. Steampunk is rather popular around the grid, with at least two continents dedicated to the concepts (New Babbage and Caledon) and many, many people roleplaying and inventing gadgets that fit the whole Steampunk motif.

Try as I might, however, I've never really been able to duplicate that sort of cobbled-together steamworks-type thing very well. While I did manage to make a rusty mechanical arm, it looked more like a machine gun than a functional hand, and didn't really scream "steampunk", more like "Oh god what is that on your arm you freak".

I tried again more recently, with more rusted-out construction setups, but again, the idea fizzled. Then I came upon the idea to construct a clock tower. Except... powered by STEAM!

While that may sound either mundanely uncreative and/or amazingly original, it's not really either; steam-powered clocks have been made in the real world, albeit in the 1970s (see the Gastown clock in Vancouver). None have really been made on a large scale before, however.

Not being a mechanical engineer, I wasn't really about to set out and design a working, honest-to-god Steam clock. Instead, I set about setting some basic construction rules, and applied those rules to my design as it was being built. The result is something that, well, LOOKS like it might, possibly, work, in theory.

I did have some help this time around, from several sources. Erich Templar has a set of steampunk textures that I have co-opted into my design, providing many of the metal textures I needed to realize my tower. And, of course, Steampunk is not complete without a set of gears, and the gear set supplied by Talin Sands is perfect for the task. I was also helped by the wonderful Lord Humphrey and Beezle Warburton, who supplied some simple clock scripts for me to doodle with.

Now, on to the tower itself. It's a doozy, weighing in at over 650 prims and jutting into the sky over 65m tall. Constructed of brick and steel, there are many windows to peer into the inner workings of the mechanical bits. Gears turn, steam hisses, and the clock ticks menacingly. Every hour upon the hour the steam pipe at the top of the structure sings the Westminster chimes, albeit with steam rather than bells (again, an idea taken from the Gastown clock). The bottom part of the tower is the most open, allowing people to use the space amongst the shiny copper pipes for their own amusements. At the top of the clockworks sits a small alcove, flanked on all sides by the clock's gears. It would be perfect for a study or any other private space. The ticking of the mechanisms would lull almost anyone to sleep... or to madness, I guess.

Because I feel it's a rather unique design (and also because it's freaking huge and not really prefabbable), I'm going to be releasing a very limited edition of the clock tower. Only ten will be sold. There exists one in-world already, a gift for a friend in the sim Phasma. There also exists the original in my workshop, but that is merely temporary.

Each Steamworks Clock Tower will come with an individually-numbered copper plaque, as well as a signed "certificate" (well, a fancy texture anyway) with the serial number as well as my signature. I will also help with setup, if desired (the gears tend to get squirrelly if you rotate the design). The Clock Tower will be sold copy/mod/notrans, like everything else in my store.

The release date is coming soon, but will most probably happen after the Christmas season. Stay tuned to my plurk, twitter, or this blog for announcements. Pricing is also coming soon, but it will certainly be well under $L7500.

Aside from that, enjoy the pics of the tower in action, and have a good Christmas. -LF