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3.2. SHAPING THE FUSELAGE 15
Figure 3.8: The left and right arrows highlighted
15.15 feet behind the reference point (indicated by the box labeled 1 in the image). Thus, in an
aircraft whose reference point is the tip of the nose, this section would be about 15 feet from the
nose. Of course, a cross-section could have a negative value here and be moved in front of the
reference point.
Note that Plane Maker will stitch your cross-sections together in the (left-to-right) order that
they appear in this box—even if the distances from the reference point that you set in this box do
not always increase from left to right. In this way, you could have a fuselage that overhangs itself,
or curves inward in some way.
The gridded white box, labeled 2 in Figure 3.9, is the cross-section box itself. Click any point
and drag it to reposition it and thus to reshape this slice of the fuselage. Double click on a point to
lock its position, protecting it from being smoothed. (Note that smoothing operations are described
in the section “Smoothing the Fuselage” below.)
Sometimes in the course of editing these cross-section points, it may be useful to zoom in and
out or move the cross-sections around. You can zoom using the − and = keys, and you can move
the sections using the left, right, up, and down arrow keys. This does not affect the model itself; it
only changes the view of the model in editing. To return to the default level of zoom and the default
positioning, simply click the Reset editing offsets button, located beneath the “Cross-Sections”
box itself.
The left and right arrows beneath the cross-section box (labeled 3 in Figure 3.9) are used to
copy a cross-section as a whole into the station to the left or right, respectively. This might be
useful if you added a new station after working on the stations you already had. In this case, you
would start with the farthest right of the stations you had previously worked on and press the right
arrow. Then, you would move left and keep pressing the “copy to the right” button, stopping when
you got to the place in the station order that you needed a new one.
Beneath those copy-left and copy-right buttons are general copy and paste buttons, labeled 4