Hi!

Please meet my new puzzle - Skyglobe:



This shape is called Truncated Triakis Tetrahedron and is one of the near-miss Johnson solids (the pentagonal faces are slightly irregular).

Similarly to Constellation Six, this puzzle had to be fudged too, but this time the laws of geometry were on my side and the angle of deviation turned to be only 2.4° (in Constellation Six 5.4°), so the fudging is very slight and almost not noticeable. It was even possible to place regular pentagons in the centers.

Skyglobe is a higher (order?) of Constellation Six. Not in the usual sense of more parallel cutting layers, but with higher number of axes - in the same sense like Magic Octahedron is related to Pyraminx, or Megaminx to 3x3x3 cube.

I decided to make this one with 6 colors instead of 12 to halve the nightmare of solving it. The colors are arranged so that each of the 4 hexagons neighbors upon all 6 colors.

YouTube video

Amazing!
You are a genius.

This is really cool
When I saw it first, I thought just bandged starminx But I think it is more looks awsome.
Totally gifted thinking!

-JEC-

NICE!!!! I love this puzzle and the Constellation Six. Meffets should contact you about mass producing both.

And I understand why this shape was used as it cuts down on printing costs but I think a Triakis tetrahedron without the truncated hexagon faces would make it a better visual match with the Constellation Six as both puzzles would be vertex turning puzzles. Not sure its worth the extra cost for a printed puzzle but something to consider if these ever are mass produced.

Carl

I've been waiting to see this puzzle for ages in your Shapeways shop, and I must say that it's my favourite puzzle of yours along with the Constellation Six (I love that puzzle because I don't understand the jumbling thing ) I do certainly hope to buy this, or better yet, get Meffert's to mass produce these. Both of these have serious mass production potential.

A 60°-HC1
Very cool.

Saw your name in the author column of the "View unread posts" page and thought "Woohoo! Time to have my mind blown." You did not disappoint.

It seems like those corners would be extremely large compared to the small pieces and would be visually unappealing.

Maybe... what about the dual of the triakis tetrahedron? If you used a Truncated tetrahedron it would be a face turning puzzle and it would give meaning to the orientation of the regular pentagon pieces... though I'm not sure what that would do to the other pieces.

Looking a little more... at a minimum that would turn it into a shape changing puzzle as it would no longer look like a Truncated tetrahedron after a 60 degree turn.

Carl

Very interesting idea and the execution is marvelous! The off-pentagonal face was almost unnoticeable until I read through your post, very interesting indeed.

I think it would have been even cooler if the Constellation Six could have had pentagonal centers like this puzzle does -- Or better yet, 13-gons! I can almost barely see the distortion at all in the Pentagons, but if you look at the isoslese triangles on the sides, the hexagon triangles are slightly larger than the pentagon tirangles. I believe this puzzle would be much harder to solve than the Constellation Six. Also, do the 60 degree turns cause the other layers to jumble, or does the puzzle remain strait?If the Skyglobe's design is anything remotely similar to the Constellation Six, I doubt it would be feasible. The Constellation Six utilizes a series of five corrugated spherical shells in order to stay together. The layers interlock together like teeth on a gear, making the puzzle rigid. Injection molding would ultimately require planar cuts in order to allow the pieces to release, which would not produce a stable puzzle. Otherwise, it would require a "knucklehead" assembly with at least three unique plates for every part. It would probably prove more expensive to produce even than the Shapeways model.

Yes, truncated shape lowers down the printing costs, but that was not the reason. Original design (never printed) was not truncated, and looked like this:


Like GuiltyBystander assumed, this looked disproportional - too big corners in comparison to tiny rays (size ratio here is even bigger than in Const_6). So I thought it would be better to truncate the corners and leave pentagons instead of the triangles. And saving costs on corners allowed me to make the resulting "ball" bigger.

Probably it's worth it to issue a trunated version of Constellation Six with 3 square faces and 6 pentagons

No, it never jumbles, with any 60°-turn its shape remains the same.

Yes, the mech idea is very similar. But who knows, I'll show it to Meffert anyway.

If anything, I prefer the one without the truncated corners, but that's just me. In my eyes it would look less like a Starminx and more like a 'Classic Timur Puzzle'.

Definition of 'Classic Timur Puzzle': A puzzle which looks simple and really cool, but boggles my mind when it comes to the jumbling, shapeshifting, bandaging and fudging.

I really love this puzzle! If you decide to sell though your shapeways shop, I hope that you offer the hexagonal extensions, as i think I would enjoy that shape more.