First off, there is no more widely known example of a geodesic dome than "Spaceship Earth".
(Although, technically it's a geodesic sphere).
The design of the geodesic dome is not as simple as it may appear, because the individual links (i.e., the "edges" of the triangular faces) must have slightly different lengths in order to give curvature to the overall surface. Typically the design of a geodesic dome begins by selecting one of the Platonic solids, such as an icosahedron inscribed in a sphere, conceptually filling up each triangular face with a set of smaller triangles, and then projecting each face onto the interior surface of the sphere.
You got all that?
