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Is there a general method of creating compounds from its components?

We have several examples of the form 'compound of n polyhedrons", eg compound of 2 cubes. Can you assemble it from 2 cubes? How?

Looking at ways to combine things I see that you can merge two polyhedrons by bringing one out of memory with the Add/blend from memory menu. I see you can alter the scales of the components. Can you alter their relative orientation? What about the relationship of their centres?

There's no dedicated way to create compounds. Some day I'd like to add that. But all the compounds in Stella's library were created somehow using other features in Stella.

When adding from memory, you're right, you can only adjust the relative scale, not orientation or centre.

One thng you can do though is adapt an existing compound. For example, if you start with the compound of 5 cubes and want a compound of 5 dodecahedra, do this:

• Put a cube in a memory slot
• Load a dodecahedron, and add the cube from memory. Now you have a compound of 1 cube and 1 dodecahedron (note in this case the cube will be entirely contained within the dodecahedron)
• Put this in a memory slot
• Now load the compound of 5 cubes from Stella's library
• Select one of the faces
• From the menu, select "Poly->Augment Polyhedron" (or just hit the keyboard shortcut "a")
• In the "Augment using" section, choose "Memory", and if necessary select the memory slot you used from the dropdown
• Select "Excavate"
• Select "Inherit colors from augmented faces"
• Click OK
• Now you'll see the augmentation preview. It probably just looks like a dodecahedron. This is because it has two choices about how to apply the excavation. Hit the Right Arrow key to cycle through the possibilities. In this case just hit it once and you should then see a preview of the 5 dodecahedron compound
• Hit Enter to accept the preview
• You should now have a compound of 5 dodecahedra

Having just written all that, I now remembered that I already have a short tutorial about this, along with a video. Here it is:
https://www.software3d.com/TuteNewCompounds.php