Planetary Outpost

A few months back, I stumbled across this quote by American computer programmer, Ellen Ullman: "We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."

I found that quote very funny, and in many ways, it also fitted the evolution of Planetary Outpost perfectly. I had a clear concept of what I wanted to achieve out of this construction, but the overall size changed as the dimensions were dictated by the features I wanted to include - it’s actually mostly due to the sliding door mechanism that Planetary Outpost is the size it is.

But this size actually happened through trial and error and this is perfectly reflected by how the base’s foundation is constructed. I didn’t think too much of its hodgepodge nature of the various plates, as it worked. Even when I took it out of LDD, it still worked fine. It’s only when I built and rebuilt the inner rooms that I noticed an issue: apply too much pressure around the middle part and the plates start to sag and loosen up. This sag would also affect the sliding door mechanism. This is obviously unacceptable and Mark Stafford would definitely agree.

So I took a close look at the underside to see what was going on, but since all the plates and structures are black, I had to go back to LDD, coloured all the parts differently. It’s then that I realised what was going on, and the extent of the ruins Planetary Outpost was actually built on.

11 plates make up the base, and to make matters worse, there’s a seam all the way down the length of the building, exactly where the main inner wall is - no wonder I’ve been having problems!

The underside is a little scary to look at (again I changed the colours there to see the difference between the plates and what’s holding them together):

A series of thin two-stud wide plates are placed along the joins to try and hold everything together. This method was inspired by LEGO’s Creator Expert Modular Building design, but it’s clearly not having the desired affect for me.

So it’s high time I made a plan, destroyed the ruins, and properly reconstruct the foundations to allow for the safe regular rebuilding of Planetary Output into one of its five possible configurations.

Thankfully, there are large plates of the exact length I need, allowing me to replace the current 11 plates with 7. This alone improves the base’s rigidity.

Experience has shown me that two stud wide plates aren’t enough to secure the underside, so I’ve replaced them with four stud wide alternatives.

I’ve also added another row of struts, bringing that total from 8 to 12, and these are now placed in strategic locations to make sure each of the new size plates is held by two to three struts.

The result not only makes for a sturdier construction, but reduces the piece count from 48 to 39, a 19% reduction - not too shabby

All original Classic Space sets came with little buggies to help the minifigs explore their surroundings. They were the simplest designs and made up of a handful of pieces, between eight (for the Galaxy Explorer - set 497) and thirteen (for the Alpha-1 Rocket Base - set 483)!

Planetary Outpost’s buggies would be more intricate and detailed - after all there are more complex pieces nowadays, like a front racer guard (part 44674) I’ve used for instance, but I wanted to keep the same overall style, ie, a one-person vehicle, open to the elements. Just like the one from the Rocket Base, I needed it to be able to be hooked up to a trailer, and just like the Command Centre (set 697), a place to attach tools was necessary. And there had to be some sort of slanted back rest.

And this is the result:

These buggies lack the traditional fuel tanks of the Classic Space versions, but at least they have headlights! Not to mention the Classic Space logo!

A small integrated solar panel gives them all the power they need for long excursions.

They’re obviously designed to be driven while wearing a newly redesigned spacesuit, and you can attach a couple of tools at the back of them… as well as an optional trailer. All for the bargain piece count of 34.

Since the crew will be needing to gather samples from the surface and bring them back to Planetary Outpost for analysis, and the buggies have no room to spare, it stands to reason a trailer had to be included. A crate is an integral part of the trailer to offer two distinct storage areas. It’s made of 29 parts.

Finally, the set also comes with three containers, which can be carried by AI5ORTS or placed on the trailer for longer journeys.

These, coupled with the excavation area, should provide enough outside play features to keep you busy for a while :)

Until the next time,

Captain out.

In addition to Planetary Outpost’s building, this proposed set also offers vehicles to venture beyond the base’s confines, and excavation areas. This is where mysterious crystals lie, ready to be extracted and analysed by your intrepid crew.

I knew I wanted a reason for the crew to step out of the airlock. I also knew it would be extremely unlikely for LEGO to reproduce the amazing crater base plates of the original Classic Space era, so the location I had in mind would have to be self-contained. I wanted something big enough for the minifigs to work in, but small enough so it didn’t increase the part count too much. This is what I came up with:

I discovered these amazing crystal pieces thanks to the Kryptonite Interception set (76045) and realised LEGO made them in many different transparent colours, so I selected my six favourites.

I found as many different sloped LEGO pieces as I could, and built up the two mounds… but once I came out of the virtual environment and created them in actual LEGO, I found out it didn’t take much for them to break up and fall apart. Not as bad as the airlocks, but still not ideal - and there was Mark Stafford’s voice in my head again…

So I decided to add a little more rigidity to the original design. The orignal design was born out of a desire to create small irregular foundations. After all, life beyond LEGO is hardly ever at right angles. To that end, the mounds’ bases are composed of a series of quarter circled and angled plates. Joined together with a few other pieces creates a completely irregular base, which was perfect for my needs.

For this update I added a few more plates on top of the bases to strengthen them, making them much easier to grab hold of without fear of them falling apart, and, I feel, I ended up with something that looks better to boot.

2018 marks the 40th anniversary of both the minifigure, and the LEGO classic space theme, so it's only fitting that the full crew of Planetary Outpost (all 15 of them, if you were to make all five configurations), decided to dress up for the occasion.

Such an occasion also necessitated yours truly - and AI5ORTS :)

So as we march into the future, let us reflect on the past, draw inspiration from it, and boldly go where no minifig has gone before!

Happy new year everyone!

Until the next time,

Captain out.

Very shortly after I submitted Planetary Outpost, LEGO posted a series of informative videos about how to design and promote your project. Something Mark Stafford said kept niggling at me because I know he was right, and deep down, I’m a bit of a perfectionist: “If you know this model is unstable, that will have to be changed”.

Now there are two aspects I knew weren’t ideal, but by October, I was suffering from LEGO construction burn out - the solution just wasn’t coming to me, so I decided to post it as is… but Mark’s words kept haunting me.

One of my issues was with the pivoting wall.

It works fine, but the pieces used to make the pivot happen weren’t strongly attached so were prone to come off, and with them, the entire wall. Not ideal for a toy.

The other niggling glitch was the airlock connection.

I used connector pegs (part 3673), just like I did with the pivoting wall, but the problem here was even worse: unless you were really careful when you slowly disconnected the airlock, it would crumble to pieces - definitely not ideal for a toy.

How to solve both these problems has been simmering in my brain for a while.

The pivoting wall was really simple: replace bricks with a series of 3 plates and change the order of the pieces. This didn’t affect the size of the building, and made the rotating action much studier.

The airlock proved trickier. I had to change the connection to a series of “Cross Axle 3M W/End Stop” (part 24316). This made the sliding action totally smooth, but much too loose: they could drop off when you moved the model around. So I also added a 1x2 tile on one side and a 2x2 plate on the top. This firmly secures the airlock to the base but also made it easily removable when needed.
 

I also took the opportunity to alter the bottom of the airlock and added an additional row of “Plate W/Half Bow Inverted 1x2x2/3” (part 24201). If you look closely, the entirety of the building’s underside is filled with those inverted bows, giving the building a rounded feel, but I wasn’t happy my original final airlock design only had one row when they’re 2 studs long.

A future minor update will actually involve a brand new piece introduced with The Joker™ Manor (70922): Plate W/Half Bow Inverted 2x2x2/3 (part 32803). 

It’s currently only available in Medium Standard Grey, and although I’ve not been shy of spray painting pieces in the past, I thought I’d wait a little to see it LEGO will soon produce it in black as well. I feel that such a piece would greatly improve my model’s underside rigidity, but also reduce the piece count: I currently need 80 1x2x2/3 pieces. The new part would mean I could use both pieces to a combined total of just 40.

But that’s for another post. Right now I have a more sturdy design capable of being played with much more roughly, and Mark Stafford no longer haunts my dreams. :) 

Until the next time,

Captain out

Creating a fully enclosed LEGO building is one thing. Making sure giant human hands can still get inside and interact with the crew and play features is another. Making this work for Planetary Outpost was the result of a lot of trial and error and compromise, but I think the final output works well and is also pretty varied.

There are three ways to access the inside. Perhaps the most obvious one if you look carefully on one side of the building is via mini hinges. They allow you to swivel walls to reveal the inside of both rooms. I’ve designed it so you can choose to get access to either one room, or the other, or both, which means that one hinged wall is much longer than the other, but the structure is strong enough to deal with it without compromising its balance or stability. I had a little fun with the lights on the side of the building (the 1x2 translucent yellow tiles), as one of them is actually on the seam, so it’s split between the two sides.

This was not my original idea. Initially I wanted to wall to pivot down, thereby removing any hinges or obvious clues as to how the walls are removed, but it didn’t work: as the wall pivoted the bottom of it would butt against the furniture and more crucially be blocked by the partition wall between the two rooms, so I had to abandon that idea and replace it with the hinges, but I feel the system still works well and is snug enough for the walls to remain in place when closed.

I did keep the idea of a hinged wall though, but placed it on the other side of the building so you can play in the corridor and access the gears to open the two inner sliding doors. Making this work was actually not easy, and I went through many different versions. LDD doesn’t represent friction at all so I only noticed problems once i started building Planetary Outpost with real bricks, and the friction of the pieces I had originally chosen actually ripped apart the wall as it was pivoting - far from ideal! I had to go through various options until i settled on the current one. The end result works very well: that wall is held in place by a single radiator grill on the right. Rotate it down or remove it (it’s only held in place by one stud), and you can then pivot the wall down. It’s held at the bottom by the rotating mechanism, while the top rests down on the ground.

The third way of accessing the inside is from the top, just like a building from the LEGO Expert modular range. To make the top build more sturdy though, what’s removable is actually two bricks and one plate thick. This makes it much easier to remove it while preserving its integrity. It also makes it easier to put it back firmly on the building. It also has the added advantage of making the remaining walls lower, so it’s easier for little people to play with the set from above.

Being able to take off the roof is the main reason why I also designed the communications array and solar panels to be removable: that way, you could forgo the roof altogether, and still be able to play with those parts of the set.

So there you have it. Three different and varied ways to get into Planetary Outpost.

Until the next time,

Captain out

Building a structure out of LEGO can be quite straightforward: stack up bricks on top of each other, and before you know it, you’ve got a building of some sort. But look at any design in real life and you’ll notice that they’re actually much more complex than they seem: stuff sticks out of various places, pipes come in and out, vents are positioned, access doors are placed, etc.

Adding such detailing to a LEGO building, especially parts that have no obvious functionality but are there to make the design look more realistic in some way, i.e., less uniform, is called greebling.

Greebling could be as simple as replacing a 1x2 brick with a 1x2 profile brick (part number 2877), and I’ve added a few of those both inside and outside Planetary Outpost.

The same applies to various types of air vents (61409 and 2412).

In fact, one of those vents has another purpose: to hold the pivoting wall that grants you access to the corridor so you can open the inner sliding doors and place your crew in that location without removing the roof. It’s secured by a single stud rather than two. To pivot the wall, rotate it down. Just a single such part is sufficient to hold the wall in place, as long as you don’t force it down, in which case all bets are off, and you might have to spend a little time looking for that part that flew away! ;)

The roof houses the communications array, solar panels and sky lights, but there was still space on it to add more complexities, so I’ve inserted pipes, more vents, and even used old style telephone receivers (6190) as interesting looking greebling. Some 1x1 round plates are even secured in between studs.

I also peppered the walls with square or circle 1x1 tiles. Some bricks have connection points on their side as well as on top of them, and I used the 1x1 (87087) and 1x2 (11211) versions around the building to add basic protrusions. I also left some without an additional tile to add variety.

Speaking of variety, there’s also a very special brick which is one of my favourites: LEGO calls it an angular brick (4070) and essentially the connection point on its side is recessed a little within itself, so if you add a 1x1 square plate to it, it doesn’t stick out as much as if you added it to a 87087 brick. [little piece of trivia, that brick is also known as an Erling Brick; it’s named after the LEGO Designer Erling Dideriksen, who invented this element in 1979, and is as far as I know, the only LEGO brick with an actual name, albeit unofficially :) ]

I have used this brick profusely in my design. It allowed me to place door controls (4221879) for the airlocks without them sticking too much into the corridor or airlock itself, saving valuable standing space for the minifig crew members. I’ve also used it to recess various 1x2 (4212363) and 1x4 (4215740) computer controls, especially in the corridor. It’s even in the base’s food processor!

But there’s a disadvantage to that brick: the other side of it is hollow so I couldn’t put it where that side would show. And when I had no choice in the matter, that’s where a little greebling came in handy too: this happened with the airlock. Look closely, and there’s a round 1x1 plate (6141) stuck to its side. It’s there to hide the hole from one of those angular bricks which holds part of the airlock controls on the other side.

Without the greebling peppered throughout the outside, that round plate would’ve looked odd. With the greebling around it, it’s just part of the design. The same applies for the gears used to control the sliding doors: the greebling around it makes it look like it’s more part of the detailing around the base, and it doesn’t stick out as much as if would otherwise.

I’ve therefore used greebling to add detail to my design, and make it look more interesting, and also to help conceal parts that have to be added to hide a design’s potential compromise.

There’s a fine balance though between greebling and overall piece count, and I did my best to add enough detailing to make the design look interesting, without going overboard and making a potential set with just too many pieces. 

All in all, without a little greebling sprinkled around it, I feel Planetary Outpost would’ve been a very bland design, and not as interesting a build as it turned out to be.

Until the next time, 

Captain out.

Check out any sci-fi movie or TV show and chances are, the doors of any base of operations, orbital space station, or starship slide open. There was no way I wasn’t going to have that in my project, and that decision actually dictated the overall dimensions of my design.

First I had to figure out how to make the sliding mechanism. LEGO has produced sets with sliding doors in the past, but examples such as the Mos Eisley Cantina involved a slider at the top which would protrude outside the building when open. This didn’t appeal to me. I decided early on that my mechanism had to be completely encased within the walls, which means those walls had to be three studs thick, and will take up a not inconsiderable amount of space inside the module, but one advantage is that the walls will be able to be different colours on either side, something which is more akin to real life anyway - a bonus, if you will.

I eventually settled on a gear mechanism using various Technic parts: turn the large gear, and the doors will open and close as you do so. I’m relying on a toothed bar for this - part 3743 - and this part’s size pretty much forced the length of the module on me: each of these bars is 4-studs wide, as are the doors, so in order to fully open and disappear inside the wall, I would’ve needed a minimum of a 5-stud wide bar, but I couldn’t find anything like that, so I had to resort to using two of these bars for each door. 8 studs for each.

This had the added benefit or giving me greater versatility as to where I could place the gear mechanism on the wall.

Sliding doors mean having to rest them on tiles so they can smoothly move in and out of the walls. In order for the crew not to have to mind the step as they cross the thresholds, it meant tiling the entire module so the floor was level throughout. This allowed me to play with colours, and design a unique corridor made up of sand yellow and sand blue, and rooms made up of sand yellow and earth blue. 

I didn’t go overboard, and kept it simple and functional - this is a working scientific and exploratory station after all, not the local art house - but it was nice to create something more colourful than the black plates the building is resting on, and to focus on a traditional Classic Space colour, albeit in different shades.

It was crucial to my design for both red inner doors that lead to the module’s two rooms to be able to open fully at the same time if necessary. After a few calculations, I settled on a length of 24 studs for the whole red inner doors mechanism. The rest of the design grew out of that decision. I had to do some last minute modifications when I transitioned my project from LDD to real bricks, as LDD has no concept of gravity! But now both doors open smoothly, don’t bash into one another, and just as importantly, don’t lose their balance!

The gears that open the red doors are located in the corridor, and I’ve positioned them so they can be easily operated without removing the roof: just slide down the corridor wall and you should have good access to both. 

The black doors that lead to the airlock are operated from the outside and the process is exactly the same, except that you’ll notice that the gears aren’t positioned in the same place for each outer door. I didn’t do this solely to create a little variety when building them, but to make sure the gears don’t butt into one another when connecting multiple modules together.

So there you have it. Five gear-operated sliding doors, each custom built to match its place within Planetary Outpost, which hopefully adds a fun degree of playability, and a traditional and expected sci-fi aspect to any space module!

Until the next time,

Captain out

Robots.

Robots are a big part of science-fiction, and let’s face it, they’re the only ones exploring space right now, so it’s undeniable that they’ll be essential to our future. So when I decided I wanted to expand beyond the Outpost to add more playability to my model, creating a robot was at the top of my list.

Many LEGO Space sets have robots, and I loved the ones from Benny’s Spaceship, Spaceship, SPACESHIP! But I wanted to create something new, something with arms and legs, something minifig sized… and that’s when I encountered problems. I discovered it isn’t easy finding pieces to design an articulated robot this small.

I started in LDD working with the hip element (13249) and seeing if I could build something out of that… but it wouldn’t work. Pieces wouldn’t fit, or be too bulky. It just wasn’t working.

I went through a lot of different ideas, version, prototypes, and I was about to give up until I found inspiration from the T-Rex in Research Institute. I loved the way that design used Bad Robot Arms as legs, plates with holders as feet, and a shaft for its hips.

This allowed me to go in an entirely different direction, with the T-Rex’s feet as the base, and a variety of other pieces that organically went up from there (quite literally) to design a robot that is almost minifig size (it’s roughly 40% taller than a minifig), with moveable arms and legs. Even the head can look up or down - although not side to side. It has an antenna for communications and can even clip tools to itself.

I was worried though that it wouldn’t stand up in real life and that it was too back heavy. LDD is a great tool but it has no concept of gravity. It’s the reason I added a round 1x1 tile on its front, as a digital attempt to make my robot more balanced.

So when the time came, and the pieces I’d ordered had arrived, this was the first thing I built, and I was pleased to say it worked even better than I was expecting: the arms can pivot at the elbows and the feet at the ankles, allowing it to be put into many different poses.

Now I needed a name. After a little fiddling about, I came up with Artificial Intelligence 5 Operating Robonaut Task Support, which is quite a mouthful, but it conveniently (sort of) contracts into ALSORTS.

It turns out ALSORTS is actually my favourite part of this entire build, mostly because it started as an afterthought and ended up being a very satisfying play feature: a brick-built (almost) minifig-sized robot with a bit of personality thrown in, made up of 28 pieces.

I hope when the time comes, you’ll have as much fun playing with ALSORTS as my kids and myself do now :)

Until the next time, 

Captain out.

The space sets of the 70s are regarded as classics by many. Fun to play with and easy to build, they excited the imagination of countless children, including myself. It is a bit daunting to think one can improve on a classic, but I’ve always had thoughts on how to make these sets better (in my mind) and Planetary Outpost is the culmination of those thoughts.

But it was important to me to anchor my proposal within the context of those original sets, so I made sure there were many nods to the designs from the 70s, and this post is about them:

1. The Support Struts

I originally wanted to use the fins just like the first sets had, but I decided against it mostly because my set will not come with a base plate, and so it’s highly likely those fins would fall off or even break when the building is moved around. Instead, I chose the same option from a slightly later set, 1980’s Beta-1 Command Base (6970), which were also used for the various ships’ landing gear.

2. The Steps

I loved the steps from the Command Centre (926) and the Galaxy Explorer’s building (497), so since my base would also be raised from the ground, I would emulate these steps - and add my own flair to them.

3. Computers

All computers have flat screens these days, but that wasn’t the case in the 70s. Those Classic Space computer bricks were so iconic, I could not not use them in my proposal, but in order to keep with the times, I dispensed with the top screens and replaced those with flat screens (as an added bonus, they’re actually removable and the crew can also use them as tablets).

4. Communications Array

Alpha-1 Rocket Base (483) and Command Centre (926) were teaming with radar dishes, and my three are heavily inspired by them - why mess with perfection?… well, I did mess a little ;)

5. Blue Bricks

But what about the traditional blue bricks and yellow windows? Classic Space did move on from that original phase to embrace white bricks with blue windows, and my set is a definite nod to that era. However, I couldn’t forgo blue bricks, and the blue line along the outside of the whole building is a nod to that vintage colour. I also took the liberty of expanding the blue palette, with sand blue and earth blue for the floors, dark azur for part of the internal walls, and transparent blue for the solar panels (and other bits and pieces). And as for transparent yellow? I use those as lights ;)

6. Bumblebee Stripes

Then there’s the yellow and black stripes…. Now to be fair, those only appeared on the spaceships, but I like them so much and they as so much a part of the design flair of the first few Classic Space sets, that I had to include a reference to them somewhere in my design… and I did, right next to the airlock doors :)

I feel these nods to the past help ground Planetary Outpost in the Classic Space universe and allow it to organically evolve into the base you now see before you.

I hope you like and appreciate it.

Until the next time,

Captain out.