I'm piecing together today's story from bits I've found around the web, so do please let me know in the comments if I get any of it wrong...

Apparently there's this guy named Jon Palmer, see? He's a cool, young, hipsterish designer, who like any cool young hipsterish designer does at least one unusual press-grabbing thing besides the typical logo creation and the like; Jon's a professional "LEGO designer," someone who creates those giant 3D spectacles made out of the European children's brick toy system, that you occasionally come across in corporate headquarters' waiting rooms and hanging from ceilings in children's museums, etc. Yeah, I bet you never even thought of that, did you? Someone's got to build all those cool giant LEGO creations you're always coming across a couple of times a year; turns out that not only is Palmer one of these people, but that he makes pretty good money from it too, just like others are making pretty good money these days building virtual corporate headquarters in Second Life and the like.

Original image courtesy Gary McIntire.

Anyway, this has put Palmer in the middle of the burgeoning, always passionate amateur LEGO builder community here in America, a whole generation of tinkerers who in another age would be model-railroad people but now are all into the building-block creations. One of the things these builders like to do, in fact, is hold conventions and other get-togethers; one of the more popular side-attractions of these get-togethers, in turns out, is in all these builders bringing a small "module" of a certain type of LEGO creation, all of them done under the same "standards" of height, width, exit locations and the like, so that during the weekend convention they can all be hooked together in the convention center's lobby, creating a gigantic unified environment with working animated trains, lights and more. (Flabbergasted that you can do such things so easily with LEGO pieces? You owe it to yourself to check out all the other things the organization does these days; despite recently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the LEGO patent, this is no longer your grandfather's European building-block toy company.)

So anyway, I guess that one of the building environments that a lot of amateur creators especially love is a futuristic one, and especially the idea of building a space-age moon base out of LEGO pieces; a group of such builders, if I have my story right, in fact appealed to Palmer himself on the matter, asking if he might be kind enough to create a standard for such a system off which all convention-going builders could base their own modules. And so Palmer did, a standard unsurprisingly enough called "Moonbase;" although not officially tied to the LEGO Corporation in any way, many of the company's employees are avowed public fans, and contribute modules themselves for the global get-togethers of passionate builders. And indeed, that I think is one of the most interesting things about the standard itself, is that it's not based on any particular type of bricks or type of architectural style, but merely the logistical nuts and bolts of the infrastructure itself: from the size of finished modules (48 x 48, the same size of a standard LEGO large gray floor piece), to the location of exit tunnels in relation to this 48 x 48 grid (in the center on each side), to the height of the tunnels and the width of the tunnels and all the other "rules" needed in order to then later easily hook the modules up to each other, even if the modules were created separately by people who have never met.

Original image courtesy Gary McIntire.

In effect, it lets each builder still create whatever their mind can come up with, from dark cyberpunk visions of a dystopian moon colony to the bright utopian hues of a Star-Trek style enlightened humanity; it also allows builders to use whatever pieces they want, to build as high or as wide as they want (as long as the finished creations are still fundamentally based on 48 x 48 floor panels), and to make the function of each module whatever it is that their nerdy little futurist heart desires, from a medlab to a dive bar. That's smart, I think, to base the standard that holds everything together merely on the boring logistical details of exit passages, rail connections and the like; that way it doesn't cut into each builder's creative vision for what in particular they want to make, the entire thing that led them to LEGOs in the first place, thus ensuring that more and more builders voluntarily adhere to the standard in question, leading sometimes to just these stunning group dioramas at these weekend get-togethers.

Original image courtesy LEGO Moonbase Flickr group pool.

Anyway, those who are interested are best off starting at the official page on the subject, hosted by Palmer himself at his ZEMI.net personal/professional site; it explains the entire standard in detail, including step-by-step cutaway diagrams of the connecting passageways in question, along with community galleries and a lot more. It's just such a smart thing to add to a far-flung community of passionate amateur builders, a way to enhance their occasional group get-togethers even more; it makes me wonder if such a community-building project could be put together for writers who attend literary conventions, Flash designers who attend industry get-togethers, and other such artistic mediums.