Stardome meditations

I have been studying the stardome module on my own, since a few years now. At the beginning I didn't even know it was called like that... and just a few weeks ago I discovered the original tutorial from the japanese website. Anyway since I have worked out by myself the technique of how to do a geodesic ball (I may have to write on this too someday), I am still going forward on my meditations...



So I have been asking myself this simple question:
How to cut the sphere in two? That means also what is the ideal base of a stardome?

Now let's just think of a dome as one half of this ball, which it's simply made of ten woven circumferences. The "official" answer (it has its own reasoning of course) includes adding extra arches/circumferences -yellow strings in the next picture-, cutting the ball along the red string allowing one of the pentagons to stay on top of the dome.

This creates a whole new pattern of triangles that of course reinforces the whole structure, organizing the covering procedure accordingly.

My intuition though, keeps telling me to proceed in another way.

This is totally experimental, as far as I've seen online on this subject. Just cut the sphere along one of the circumferences (red string in the next picture), shifting instead one of the hexagons on top of the dome.

What happens on the base of the dome is that there are 6 pentagon sides (red arches) and 12 hexagon sides as shown in the next sketch.

Not really surprisingly, if we had to add those same reinforcement arches determining the same kind of triangles as before... the number of triangles and pentagons for the cover would be still the same. The pattern of the cover would look something like this (simple hand drawn sketches).

top view

side view

I will keep studying this design and implement it in a small model as soon as I can, if it makes sense... not completely sure about it though! Real life practice with show the way.