Terrain Workshop: Medium Sized Building

I was at my local Lego store the other week and they had Light Bley 1x10 Bricks on the Pick-A-Brick Wall.  Seeing this led to them rattling around my head for the next few days until an idea formed.  If you lay four of those bricks out in a square pattern with one end overlapping the other so the whole thing forms an 11 Stud by 11 Stud square, you can alternate this square in overlapping sections to make a shell of a building.  Three layers would be composed of twelve pieces which is 2 Hits.  If you put a Large Jumper at each corner the stud on top of the Jumper has enough offset that you can put an even numbered Plate on the top to make a roof.  The one in the picture below is a 16x16 Plate from Make-It Blocks.  It's a little big but that gives plenty of room for Frames to stand on the top of it and fight.  Just sayin'.  :-)  If you hide a smaller plate under the 16x16 that gives you a nice round six pieces which makes another Hit.

So if you're using 6P scale -- like I normally do -- the resulting building is 25.5 feet on a side and 11 feet tall.  (The overlapping roof is 40 feet on a side.)  The building will take 3 Hits to destroy.  It will still be Cover if the roof is blasted off but not past the second Hit.  It's a very Brutalist design as it has no doors or windows but it does take up a decent amount of space, is easy to build, is fairly cheap, and is also easy to expand.  Yes, there is a gap between the top of the wall and the roof created by the Large Jumpers but you can't see it from above and it'll disappear once the building takes the first Hit of Damage.

Doing some quick checking; a 16x16 Plate -- in Light Bley -- is $2.00 on Bricklink, a 1x10 Brick is $0.29 per, and a Large Jumper is $0.01 per.  That's a total of $5.52 per building.

And if you change the 16x16 Plate for two 6x12 Plates you'll have a nice even six pieces for that initial Hit -- which pleases my OCD tendencies -- it reduces the overhang to something less comical, and -- at $0.44 per -- it reduces the overall price of the building to $4.40 each.  It also changes the the 6P scale length to 30 feet on a side for the roof.  As a trade-off the center of the roof is a little weaker than the single plate version.  I changed the color of the roof Plates so the difference would be easier to see.

Orrrrrrr, you could change the roof to four 6x6 Plates -- $0.13 per -- then add another level of 1x10 Bricks.  Which would change the parts count to twenty-four and the Hits to 4.  That would change the price to $5.20 per building, making it cheaper and taller than the initial design.  And the 6P scale height would change to 14 feet.  Again, as a trade-off the center of the roof is weaker than the single plate version.  The roof plates are held on by a single stud so they will pop right off if you try to pick it up that way.  I changed the color of the roof Plates and the extra Bricks so the difference would be easier to see.

Oh, and if you add another twelve 1x10 Bricks to the original design, along with adding 2 Hits, anything standing on top of the roof is considered Elevated -- if you feel like using that rule it's on pages 134 and 135.  The overhang of the original 16x16 Plate roof should also allow use of the Roof Rule -- page 135.  In 6P scale the building would be 20 feet tall.

Size Comparison.

All three "sizes".

I hope this gives people a quick solution for constructing buildings for their battlefields.