Kanker's Tako a breif history of SL sailing

Owner of the SL group "SLSF"
http://world.secondlife.com/group/e176c7b1-8605-e4e1-8ac5-f3b3162f89c4

Kanker Greenacre, is the father of SL sailing. Born in 5/16/2003, he is a very early resident and helped develop some of the most fun Resident Projects in the early days of Second life. Back in those days, no one was ever very old then, ambient sound of SL wind was always much stronger than it is today, and as a person walked around the big empty world of SL (there was far less than 4,000 people online at any given time) you would hear the wind everywhere – a wind that actually was measurable and built into the game’s framework. Kanker came up with the idea of why not build a boat that actually uses this SL wind to power it – a sailboat in fact -- just like real life, that takes the wind and and the principles of angles and “lift” to power the boat.

So in June of 2005 he did just that, and came up with the Tako. Early tests and races showed the inherent fault of actually using SL wind. As we all know it spins like a top around the compass – very un-real-life like. So then he came up with Race Wind that would give some stability to races for all sailors, and if your going to have races you need a start-line, with a starting clock to keep track of boat times; and if you have all this with people using your boat, you need an SL group, so he created the SLSF (Second Life Sailing Federation) the very first group dedicated and devoted to sailing in Second life. To this day it is still one of the largest sailing groups in SL.

But its not enough that he made all these things, what’s so important to all of our fun was his incredibly generosity if his talent and his spirit. It was very important to him that he create a boat that was approachable and affordable to everyone in Second Life and priced it way below its true value. He did that with all his stuff, that I could tell. As the sport of sailing in Second life grew and other boat-makes were struggling with with developing similar scripts to power theirs, Kanker freely and openly shared his Tako script with other builders. All of the major builders barrowed heavily on his basic framework of code OR were heavily influenced by it even to this day.

We honor you, kanker, for being you and for setting the foundation for a lot of fun in SL