Mobaco with round towers

When I first knew about Mobaco, I was dreaming about creating big castle's, with towers and gates. But how to add these elements gently into the Mobaco ecosystem?

Mobaco is having floor plates with square hole patterns, fitting columns and wall panels. So basically only retangular type buildings + tower segments could be created. It's time to see how to blend in different tower types, while still re-using Mobaco columns & panels and with minimum amount of new parts...

The doors & gates were tackled in a different post. So let's focus on the ideal tower add-on.

Polygone towers

July 2021 Caspar and myself came up with different concepts and some were even build. Although you could add an angled square tower (first picture below), it's nicer if the tower blends into the building, like the last 3 options. So it's time tinkering about different ways, adding these towers and connect these to the rest of the construction.

New materials needed:

• New round columns (annoying)
• New floor plates (easy)

Although standard panels & connecting floor strips could be reused, it seems a bit unwanted, creating new round columns, so these ideas are not extremely handy.

Dom tower & church

After climbing the real Dom Tower in 2024, it was again time looking into (stepped) tower modifications & curved walls, see article about creating the Dom tower & church. This time using standard columns:

It turned out, these towers are way more practical, working with 45 & 60 angles. Also standard ground plates could support theses tower models, so it's more easy moving from curved to straight walls and vica versa.

Gigantic big dome...

Around 2025 Klaas T created a gigantic big dome inside his replica of parliament building of Hungary.
And a nice detail, the dome construction is hollow on the inside.

Round towers...

While creating new round towers for L'Edifice (2026), it was also a nice experiment, if these match Mobaco too. Original, there are 5 types of towers. They all use the same crenellated base tower (D22) with and having different floor panels & roofs on top. Type I, includes also an additional round tower (D23):

So let's combine these with Mobaco:

With some minor adjustments, these towers fit the Mobaco system very well!

• Instead of vertical slots, it needs horizontal slots for connecting to Mobaco floor strips
• The diameter should be a little smaller, so the base tower fits nicely in between the columns.

Overall, these towers integrate very well with existing Mobaco construction elements.

Modulair designs & prototyping...

More people got enthousiast about these round towers and were tinkering about follow up in some way or another.

• Caspar was designing modulair 1/4th tower panels.
• So why not create modulair l'Edifice towers too?

So it was time to draw, make & test some different concepts for both directions:

1. Modalair Mobaco curved panels with different heights and crenellated wall parts.
   These panels are inserted into column grooves.
2. Modulair cylindrical segments with different heights and a crenellated tower tops.
   These are placed inside columns, although columns are not mandetory.

Also Rolf build (again) some nice prototype parts for testing both versions:

Left side: curved panels, playing with some Mobaco designs.
Right side: cylindrical segments, with small openings.

Panel heights...

Panel heights depending basically on two Mobaco versions:

• Original Moubal series: floor height 100% = ~102 [mm]
• Later Jumbo series: floor height varies, mostly at ~55%.

Here an overview of Mobaco parts found and different options how to staple these:

Logic modulair heights:

a. 100%, like parts: 10...15 (typical Moubal)
b. 72.5%, like parts: 18, 20, 29
c. 55%, like parts: 19 & 54 (typical Jumbo)
d. 27.5%, like parts: 22...25, 73
e. 10%, like part 27.

LeoCAD

It's relatively easy to add some parts into LeoCAD, getting a quick insights about how to build with these parts.

Curved panels:

Caspar created multiple idea's how to implement such an curved panel and especially how new connector strips should look like. This resulted into these basic shapes in LeoCAD. There are only 3 round floor shapes, which could be combined with the available Mobaco floor strips & panels. It was also time to create a first virtual building:

Modulair panel heights:

• Quickly it became clear, creating a flush 1/4th high curved wall, there should be no round floor panels sticking out.
  → So the curved panels were extended: standard height + 2x floor strips. On the both top sides, there are 2 grooves, so these curved panels stay compatible with standard floor strips.
• This makes it questionable, if the shorter curved panels need to have these grooves too? Or should there be 2 curved panel series, making these additional curved parts fully interchangeable with the Mobaco system:
  • Extended curved panels, including the double floor(strip) extension. (5 lengths)
  • Normal height curved panels. (5 lengths)
  • (This is excluding necessary 'design' parts, like windows and doors.)
  • (This is excluding the somewhat strangere parts: #21, #28 & #28H.)

Other new parts, besides the 10x curved panels:

• 4x types, quarter round floor parts inside curve, closing the interior.
• (1x quarter round floor parts, around outside of the curve, closing the interior. (optional))
• 4x types quarter round roof parts, on top of the structure.
  (These top floors will always lay on top of the 2 layer floor panels of normal buildings.)

While trying to keep it simple, many different building shapes could be produced:

These 1/4 curved wall are a great addition. Many more different building types could be build.
With the new two ground plate pies, combined with standard floor strips/panels, many floor elements (like D1 & V1) could be created.

Cylindrical segments:

Due to the available l'Edifice parts, creating this Mobaco derivative was more easy. Only the tower base need to be modified, fitting Mobaco dimensions:

Aligning the segments:

• Like the curved panels, the same 5 segment heights are reused.
• Maybe not mandatory, but a simple addition would be inner 'flaps' for building concentric in height.
  (For LeoCAD this is not handy, so these might be removed again...)
  • These flaps also allows for building w/o supporting columns.
  • If the top segment is flat or crenelated, a round floor section could be created too.
• Quarter, half and three quarter towers could still be build. Since 3 of the for grooves next to the tower segments are still accessible, radial & tangential walls could be created, optional closing part of the cylinder wall.

Other new parts, beside the 5x cylindrical segments:

• 1x crenelated tower top,
• 1x new floor plate is necessary, closing the crenelated tower top.

Round tower roofs:

Both systems could reuse the l'Edifice round roofs and belonging circulair floor plates:

It's a great design. Just adding some simple forms, creating subtitle changes.

Coloring parts:

These custom parts are 'color less', when used in LeoCAD. This means you could add your own color to these parts. The Mobaco library uses colors from the standard color pallet, so these colors will blend in perfectly with the existing Mobaco library.

Wrapping up

Both round tower directions workout great:

3D Models

Curved panels:

• Compatibility: This method does work, icw standard Mobaco parts.
• Versatile: There are many more designs possible, next to towers, also curved walls (convex/concave) etc.
• Interlocking with existing Mobaco parts:
  • Floor stirps: Compatible with all current floor strips.
  • Floor panels: Not compatible.
  • Columns: Nice way to build straight & curved wall, when placed on both sides of the columns.
• Height:
  • Keeping flush towers, extended panels are a bit higher than standard panels, so they still align to a 2 layer floor plan.
  • Also 'standard' panels could be included, for stapling different colors and/or shapes.
• Extra parts:
  • Many new floor strips/panels.
• Roofs: Like the cylindrical segments, identical roof types could be used for this system.
• Storage is a big advantage: these are the relative small stackable parts, which are easy to store.
• Mobaco recognition / design aspects:
  • These panels are 1-2/3 longer, while keeping the same height. This is making it hard to copy current Mobaco designs directly. (Work still in progress.)

Conclusion:

If you really want to build with curved walls: the suggested new 18 solid parts are not enough, due to different design(/color) combinations, many more parts could be possible. These route will end up in a double full set of all existing Mobaco wall panel types. It was a very interesting route to explore, but it's not the simple tower add-on what I had in mind.

Cylindrical segments:

• Compatibility:
  • This method does work too, icw standard Mobaco parts.
  • Due to less interference with the rest of the Mobaco system, less unique parts needed and more easy build.
  • It's even possible to move these towers 1/2 bay size, blending a 2 bay tower, next to a 1 bay width wall.
• Versatile: It's still possible to build 1/4, 1/2, 3/4th visible tower sides, although the curved panels are way more modulair.
• Interlocking with existing Mobaco parts:
  • Floor stirps: Compatible with all current floor strips.
  • Floor panels: No, just a small collision appreas to happen...
  • Columns: Still available from 3 sides. So flat walls could blend the round tower into a square building.
• Height: It's a big plus, making these tower segments modulair, instead of the #original-one-size-is-all-there-is.
• Extra parts: Need one circular floor panel for closing the crenellated top.
• Roofs: Like the curved parts, identical roof types could be used for this system too.
• Storage: Need lot more space, storing the same amount of towers...
• Mobaco recognition / design aspects:
  • Some (Mobaco-design) distraction on these towers would be great too... Not sure how & what.

Conclusion:

If you want to add towers to your Mobaco projects, I would suggest the cylindrical segments. This requires only new 7 unique solid parts, it feels more like some extra items, instead of complete new set of parts.

The Mobaco tower quest...

So my Mobaco tower quest is finally over:
I like the cylindrical segments, also from esthetic point of view.
Round towers should be round, optional additional columns could be placed on the side(s).
Including those nice round towers roofs, these objects are great & simple add-ons.

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So, what are you going to build?