Description

It's a set of LEGO compatible baseplates, with two plate dimensions: 10x10 pins (80x80 mm) and 20x20 pins (160x160 mm)

They are designed to fit with regular LEGO bricks in order to create a martian terrain scenery.

Designing

I have downloaded the STL scan of the Gale Crater from

https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/gale-crater

and created all around with Blender, adding the base and the LEGO pins, the 20x20 pins version has 4 auxiliary pins for put a a flag on the crater.

The decimate modifier is used in order to reduce the numbers of the polygons from the NASA gale crater scan.

Sources in Blender format are available for download.

Printing advice

I have printed the models with:

• 0.4 mm nozzle
• 0.2 mm layer height
• 30% infill
• 6 perimeters (2.4 wall thickness)

I advice to use a 30% infill setting for better finishing of the crater surface.

Weight of the finished objects with 30% infill: 20 g (10x10) and 80 g (20x20).

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

NASA credits

Stl scan of the gale crater downloaded from https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/gale-crater

Special thanks

To Gianluca Faletti (aka Kino) for Blender tips and tricks

Resources

Thing on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2065782

GitHub: https://github.com/alessiocavalieri/lego_gale_crater

Wiki: http://itink.it/wiki/doku.php?id=en:tinkering:3dprinting:myowncreatedobjects:legogalecrater

Google plus photo album: https://goo.gl/photos/Mdvz5QRDDY53t3bM7