This was a very unusual build for me, and also my first time doing much with the Lowell sphere design. It took me a little bit of experimenting to work out how it functions at this scale.
This was the basic assembly that I repeated for each of the 6 sides, making good use of our supply of medium dark flesh and dark orange plates. The vast majority of the planet surface is made of 2×2 and 1×2 plates, since those were our most plentiful plate sizes in those colors at the time.
With just two of the sides connected you can already see how the ‘sphere’ shape is accomplished.
I left the middle empty on several of the sides to start with, so I could add the space colony easily later.
Then I came up with this core structure for the sphere, as I wanted to make sure it was super solid while building on it later.
The two sections slotted together, and then were connected to each other by the planet surface sections.
Worked pretty well! Not having the bottom fully rounded out yet kept the planet from rolling around.
Time to start on the base structures!
When working with micro scale buildings I often start by table scrapping lots of different connection and structure options. Here is what I came up with to start with, and a few of these did make it into the final build.
A 4×4 dimpled dome made a great central hub for the base, and I really like the texture of the stacked 3×3 dishes.
In my first table scraps photo you can see some earlier green house options, but this extremely simple design ended up working best. Repetition played a big role in all the man made structures I added.
Quite possibly my favorite section was the rocket launch pad. Some lattices and a window shutter were used for the tower framework. And those 1×4 solar panel tiles obviously had to be used somewhere!
At this point I realized the planet was still looking pretty empty, so I pulled off a bunch of the plates from the front side to allow for more buildings to be added.
These particular buildings are almost identical in structure to the bottom section of the rocket launch pad.
Some radar dishes on the back side were my final addition.
Along with a simple black stand, that I edited out for the final shot.
Asteria Colony: Build Log
This was a very unusual build for me, and also my first time doing much with the Lowell sphere design. It took me a little bit of experimenting to work out how it functions at this scale.
This was the basic assembly that I repeated for each of the 6 sides, making good use of our supply of medium dark flesh and dark orange plates. The vast majority of the planet surface is made of 2×2 and 1×2 plates, since those were our most plentiful plate sizes in those colors at the time.
With just two of the sides connected you can already see how the ‘sphere’ shape is accomplished.
I left the middle empty on several of the sides to start with, so I could add the space colony easily later.
Then I came up with this core structure for the sphere, as I wanted to make sure it was super solid while building on it later.
The two sections slotted together, and then were connected to each other by the planet surface sections.
Worked pretty well! Not having the bottom fully rounded out yet kept the planet from rolling around.
Time to start on the base structures!
When working with micro scale buildings I often start by table scrapping lots of different connection and structure options. Here is what I came up with to start with, and a few of these did make it into the final build.
A 4×4 dimpled dome made a great central hub for the base, and I really like the texture of the stacked 3×3 dishes.
In my first table scraps photo you can see some earlier green house options, but this extremely simple design ended up working best. Repetition played a big role in all the man made structures I added.
Quite possibly my favorite section was the rocket launch pad. Some lattices and a window shutter were used for the tower framework. And those 1×4 solar panel tiles obviously had to be used somewhere!
At this point I realized the planet was still looking pretty empty, so I pulled off a bunch of the plates from the front side to allow for more buildings to be added.
These particular buildings are almost identical in structure to the bottom section of the rocket launch pad.
Some radar dishes on the back side were my final addition.
Along with a simple black stand, that I edited out for the final shot.
Thanks for reading!