I have found that functional spaces often work that way.
I've been looking for other pictures of domes. Nothing really fits very well. But I did notice that as the scale of a domed structure grows larger, there is a tendency to reduce its height component.
This can be done in two ways, by slicing only the top of a sphere off, or by using a semiparabolic arch to support the roof.
It's important to remember that much of the stress to our dome is from internal pressure. Accordingly, much of its strength comes from tensioning cables that run in a smooth arc through the girder structure.
We also found it convenient to use transparent glazing of uniform dimensions in our frame support. With the scale of our structure, it is hard to appreciate what this looks like. For the most part, the upper dome surface appears to be transparent, with just a hint of the metallic components appearing as a network of grid lines.
In reality, those spidery members are twenty to thirty feet across, with cogs to assist the crawler maintenance craft in climbing about the inside and outside of the dome. Those craft are used by the maintenance and repair crews to get quickly to the scene of a damaged area and repair it.
I like arches.
:-)
for me as a draftsman, the hard part is not in defining the dome dimensionally, it is in aligning and extruding the subassembly geodesic panels - something about it irks the hell out of AutoCAD2000