Plastic Fantastic: Biodome update and Workbench

Thought I'd do a quick follow up on those Lego 'Biodomes', that I was playing around with a month or two back, as part of the series on taking various plastic odds and ends and turning them to wargaming uses.

As you can see in the photo above, the yellow tinted dome has been turned into an agricultural or hydroponic station, complete with airlock tunnel made from a few odds and ends, together with its complement of vegetation inside. The scale/size definitely leans toward the 2mm or small-scale SciFi end of things - seen here against a base of Germy's light hover scouts from GZG.

Unfortunately, the yellow sheen of the dome, whilst without a doubt being absolutely Space-tastic, lends a rather sickening and disorienting visual hue to the woodland scenics inside; this is somewhat apparent in these photos, although in real life the effect is much more mindbending - I would probably use a clear transparent dome in future, so the internals would be more visible and appealing.

This negative effect was compounded in the T.I.E. fighter cockpit piece when employed in a similar role - I'd envisaged it as some sort of power generation facility or processing plant with those chimney-like uprights, but the dark smoked plastic together with the printed-on framework means most of the interior is obscured and hard to see - I'd used all sorts of bits to represent machinery and placed them on a printed circuit board off-cut, trimmed to fit the internal footprint of the dome - all now rather lost under the completed piece:

So, all in all, Biodome '6' on Mars, and the Terraforming Energy Generator on Dantooine are a bit under-powering, but were an interesting experiment that gave me some good ideas to expand upon in the future, and of course were cheap and easy to build - always a plus!

Moving on to what is now on the Workbench, a view of what first got me started on this whole mucking about with plastic bits lark; namely the feet from Lego Bionicle toys:

This small selection shows the obvious potential for building space vessels on a budget, with nice inscribed details and suitably SciFi aesthetics; the only wrinkle, I think, being their large size, although that said, two combined back to back would easily make a pretty impressive Dreadnought type:

Will be playing about with some of these over the Christmas break, and also what has recently caught my eye, via EBay, some Kinder Egg Surprise spaceships...... Buck Rogers meets Hydra Miniatures' 'War Rocket' anyone?