ETA-Station – A First Look

Klaus Buchheim

ETA-Station is the latest planetary base developed by the exploration company on a Moon orbiting HIP 99770 b in the 29 Cyngi system.

The concept of ETA-Station is a single building on a small rock in the mid of a moon-wide Ocean. Thus the building is build like a skyscraper, built upwards to accommodate the different stations.

The Template

As a template I used the Avengers Tower BUT not the LEGO Variant but the so called Hero Tower from Panlos, which is an unofficial build of the Avengers Tower.

Why? you may asked, I use the Hero Tower and no the LEGO version. The reason is two-fold:

  • I had the opportunity to get a Hero Tower set for free, so I took the opportunity
  • Cost: I assumed if I start with the Avengers Tower, I need a lot of extra parts, thus driving up cost. Especially if I got a Hero Tower Set, which gave me a lot of base parts to start building

So I started thinking about ETA-Station with the Hero Tower as the template:

Design

A first step was to assign the different floors to different “functions”. After a few iterations I used an order roughly inspired by the Book / TV Series “Silo” :

Basement: Energy and Drilling / Raw Material Extraction

  • 1st Floor: Crew Quarters & Hospital
  • 2nd Floor: Greenhous / Lifestock
  • 3rd Floor: IT / Datacenter
  • 4th Floor: Command Center
  • 5th Floor: Material Lab I
  • 6th Floor: Material Lab II
  • 7th Floor: Maintenance / Repairs
  • 8th Floor: Cafeteria & Landing Pad
  • Roof: Astronomy / Science

The idea is to use as much as possible the Hero Tower pieces, while using my own part stock to adopt color codings and for interior decoration resp. building out the functions

Status

A first version of the ETA-Station is now finished, implementing the different functions in the Hero Tower Blueprint:

The color coding is mainly blue / Grey as this allows max. reuse of the light grey parts from the Hoer Tower Set. Special parts (transparent, windows and facade parts) are kept from the Hero Tower thus leading to a blend of Light Grey, dark grey, light blue transparent … In a perfect world, everything light blue would be yellow, everything dark grey would either be blue or light grey, but the resp. parts are not available.

In terms of functions / levels the sequence looks good and will most likely remain as is in further updates.

What is still TBD is the colouring, it still does not look necessarily like “Classic Space” as it looks too colorful. But it is not also 100% clear what to change. And some parts are missing resp. have not been switched to the correct color as I didn’t had those parts available:

  • The dark grey wedge bricks shall be changed to blue, resp. parts need to be ordered. This will further push for a “Classic Space” look
  • Some fences on the 1st floor outside are in grey as not enough white fences have been available
  • Some ground floor tiles might be changed, I think some are too colorful and distract.
  • Maybe some internal colors in a floor might be swapped to either light grey or blue. In the opened position (as seen above), the interior is very grey and might be replaced with some blue elements. Example are the grey arches on the 6th and 7th floor or the light grey column which might switch to a grey / blue pattern.
  • May be exchange the white fences on the 1st floor with light grey or blue fences to avoid an additional color.

Missing

An element yet missing is the base resp. the surroundings of ETA-Station. I plan to build a rock base on which the tower would stand and surround it with blue baseplates for the water. The plan is also to build a 2nd rock, so the tower can be displayed in open and close position. In addition a landing pad will be added, somehow connected to the rock or smaller rocks in the water.

Next Steps

The following steps are planned to complete the model in the next 6 months:

  • Build a Stud.io model so it becomes easier to experiment with colours. Changing parts is tedious in an actual build.
  • Exchange ground floor tiles with “Classic Space colors” such as blue, light grey and yellow to have less colors
  • Buy the missing parts to get the colours
  • Build the base rocks, landing pad and surroundings