Hammond pressed his nose to the port beside his seat as the ground seemed to drop away from his shuttle. After five years back on Earth, he was back at Candor Chasma Valles Marineres - home. There, built into the hillside was Friedmanton, Mars' first permanent settlement. It was just as he had left it, the first landing modules and greenhouses from Earth, the manufacturing area, and the main habitat built into the hill. With new money from investors and grants, Hammond was back to expand the settlement from 12 inhabitants to 24.

That was only part of the backstory I told myself as I finished a model of the Hillside Base for the Mars Foundation, whose goal is to design, fund, build, and operate the first permanent settlement.

The model was made from gypsum and cornstarch using stereo lithography. Measuring roughly 8x8 inches, it was extremely rough. The Foundation gave me the chance to finish it for use in various group presentations.

I used Aves putty to fill in several voids in the model that may not have been defined by the computer code used to program the machine that 'grew' the model. I used more Aves to fix a collapsed wall of a hillside module enclosure.

I downloaded several great high resolution surface images taken by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in an effort to reproduce the overall color of the Martian landscape. After playing with several mixes of Model Master acrylic rust, sand, red earth, yellow and a few more, I came up with a mix I was somewhat satisfied with. I painted portions of the settlement made from native material sand. Then I used various washes of armor sand, rust, earth brown, etc. over the hill, the valley and the settlement. I drybrushed ghost gray to simulate the Martian rock where rovers and foot traffic had exposed it, including a hiking trail up into the hill.

I brushed several of the structures with Gunze Mr. Resin Primer Surfacer to tone down the extreme roughness. I wasn't satisfied with the results on the spheres in the manufacturing area and the refractive spheres on the hillside.

I sawed off the spheres and replaced them with spherical map pins dipped in Primer Surfacer to get approximately the same size. I added two spheres near the hillside where the computer model had failed to add water tanks shown in computer art on which the model was based.

I then dipped some domes in Testors acrylic white paint. I dipped the refractory domes in Testors chrome silver enamel. I then dipped the silver domes in Tamiya clear orange thinking it might simulate the light filtering through the Martian atmosphere. It didn't look right, so I made more domes and left them silver but used two of the orange domes in the manufacturing area for variety.

I painted the 4 open greenhouse modules silver, then stippled with some Testors Model Master green enamel, then brushed over a mix of Future and orange food coloring. Then I used Scale Master silver decal strips to complete the greenhouse 'structure' and brushed more colored Future over them to seal them.

I resisted various urges to add some frost to dark corners and an open pool of water. Had one requirement not been that it had to travel without breaking, I would have added some crushed kitty litter rock and perhaps a Martian dust devil from cotton, perhaps even some tiny rovers and a flying vehicle. Rather than risk small parts breakage, I quit at that point.

I mailed the hillside diorama directly to Mars Foundation conference, where it made its way into a presentation the same week. I mainly do vehicles, so this landscape was challenging and fun. I wish a small garage kit manufacturer would mass produce this model and the two additional phases shown on the group's website.

For more information about the Mars Hillside Settlement and the Mars Foundation, including detailed drawings and technical papers, please click here.