Coruscant urbanized it's core?

[Vance]

So this idea of Coruscant being "one big planet", that is not only covered by cities, but actually filledwith them, was one which I didn't come up with originally by myself; a chap by the title of OnlyPeaceinDeath first proposed this idea, based upon some behind the scenes information he found regarding TCW: To Catch a Jedi on the official Clone Wars Facebook page (and official SW website). I simply collected all of the evidence and wrote about it on my site:

http://www.galacticempirewars.com/corus ... e-big-city

The idea had been floating around for months but I nwever got round to writing it down until recently. I was quite surprised when Dark Disciple came out and quite explicitly stated that Coruscant is a planet which is urbanized to the core, and this is what finally convinced me to knuckle down and get these ideas on paper. I feel the case for it is pretty strong now, but it is early days yet of-course, since the guys creating the universe can be a bit fickle when it comes to consistency sometimes, and I do wonder how many people creating for SW really think of Coruscant as a world filled by city, as opposed to a planet merely covered by city? So I'm more than prepared for the new films or w/e to blow this notion out of the water, despite the legitimacy I believe that it has right now considering the state of evidence.

[Zixinus]

What I wonder is that with such big hollows how does the city not eventually collapse? Building upwards and upwards is all nice and dynastopian but in practical terms any building can only take as much as its foundation. And if you can't build up but down, aren't you eventually compromising the foundation of the buildings above you?

Or do such things happen?

[Darth Tanner]

With as much high level gravity tech as Star Wars were you can have floating parking spaces for your space ships I'd imagine the very high value buildings at the top of the stack can afford to have antigrav foundations carrying much of the load?

Also it does raise the idea that is Coruscant a planet at all and not a space station if there is any planet left down there but its all building all the way down?

[SpottedKitty]

You mean it used to be a really big space station, but "it just growed"...? Presumably this would have happened so long ago no-one remembers it, or else it would have been mentioned somewhere.

[Purple]

I think he means the opposite. That is to say that used to be a planet but they dug too greedily and too deep and now it no longer is one due to a lack of non artificial material.

[Darth Tanner]

The visuals on 1313 would imply the cityscape is a good 4,000km thick - I just don't see how you could get that from natural growth downwards - you would be undermining everything by digging down on any scale and unless Star Wars structural technology is literally magic strong where they can treat a roof as a foundation level for an additional few thousand levels of massive sky scrapers then the bottom levels would be nothing but wall to wall foundations which removes the point of having them in the first place. To be building on such a scale you would already have to have stopped all tectonic movement, hell your already far below the crust and into the outer core so there would be little but a cold lump of iron left at the centre of your planet.

It's an Odysseus ship/Triggers broom situation, how much planet can you remove and replace with imported city before it stops being a planet?

The earlier Star Wars works where the bottom levels are abandoned wild places full of concrete eating slugs make it even worse as all your buildings would be collapsing from their key structural integrity being undermined and the maintenance workers being eaten. Can you imagine the property prices required to justify draining a planets oceans and yet there were existing basement levels that could be effortlessly refurbished into usable space?

[madd0ct0r]

I see no need to assume that a level covers the surface area of a sphere.

[Darth Tanner]

That would reduce the amount of material needing to have been removed, there is supposed to be a mountain top still on the surface afterall but the levels should still cover quite a lot of the planets surface, otherwise why dig deeper in one point rather than expanding sideways?

It could simply be that shafts like the one in 1313 are very deep and have urban sprawl going off from their sides but dont stretch very far at all and were simply inverse skyscrapers allowing for access to deeper faciltiies/industry. That would reduce the impact on higher level foundations quite a bit but the Clone Wars gives the strong impression the layers are literaly like seperate city scapes with one supported above another which would support much wider habitation than simply shafts.

[Purple]

Can you imagine the property prices required to justify draining a planets oceans and yet there were existing basement levels that could be effortlessly refurbished into usable space?

Not a difficult task. After all, how many people would want to live at the very bottom of a planet sized city in a place that newer sees the sun and where all ventilation is artificial? And how many of those people would have the resources to make an investment to clear those levels up worth while?

[madd0ct0r]

do we have a size and a gravity for coruscent? It's easy enough to calculate how deep down into the crust the layer of habitle space density needs to go for construction material for all the layers above the original ground level.

[SpottedKitty]

Something else just occurred to me; if you really do go mindbogglingly deep, you start to get the actual force of gravity going down, because there's an appreciable amount of planet further away from the centre than you are. Cue lots of gravity generators, unless you really don't mind wallowing around like a half-asleep walrus...

[Patroklos]

That works both ways though right? If you add a surface layer of a few thousand kilometers, say 1,000 kilometers of solid mass if it was compacted. Consisting primarily of modern construction materials including duranium and the like not to mention the basically water mass of the trillions of beings who live there and the needed reserve water/biomass to maintain them. Whatever the gravity was when the planet was first settled sure isn't what it is now.

Think about it. Every observation we see shows a planet with Earth like gravity and presumable an Earth like atmosphere that humans breath without a thought. If we are talking about 3-5K kilometers of cityscape that could get close to doubling the planets diameter if its Earth like in geology. Even if its geology is different it can't be different enough to make such an increase in volume, mass or both inconsequential. It basically has to have been roughly Mars size originally, and that has some pretty severe implications regarding what we know about the planets early history.

[Simon_Jester]

Structurally, the technology exists in Star Wars to do this- if they can amass enough energy to destructively blow apart a planet, they can surely dig it up a bit at a time and shore it up with force fields and unobtainium girders. Especially given ten thousand years or more of urban development.

The real question is: what kind of population density would you get from that? How many people would live on Coruscant? What obstacles would you encounter trying to feed the people, and supply such a huge population with materials and energy?

Plus, of course, the parts of Coruscant we ever see are all 'on the surface' or appear to be within a few kilometers underground, no more.

It sounds like the "urbanized to the core" claim is an isolated one-off, in which case we're probably going to have to discard it or rationalize it to avoid conflicts with the rest of the canonical events that took place.

[Darth Tanner]

Indeed, seeing as the principle source of a 4000-5000km thick cityscape is a cancelled game the evidence for city growth on that scale is a bit shaky.

Just for fun though based on London population density of 2691 per square km and using an average height of 100m to be conservative then with an earth covered in city going 4000km deep you would get a population of 27,561 trillion.

Even better if you had only 2000km going deep and 2000km going up then you would get a population of 56,780 trillion.

EDIT: thousand kms

[Thanas]

It also is pretty much contradicted by every source in the EU (non-canon I know but the ICS and Worlds books are still canon I know) which do not give anything close to that population. Nor would it make sense - the air traffic around coruscant is nowhere near close enough to the level that would be needed to supply such a population.

[Elheru Aran]

On the other hand, speculatively, perhaps the lower levels aren't actually urbanized, and contain massive hydroponic and energy production establishments?

[Patroklos]

It also is pretty much contradicted by every source in the EU (non-canon I know but the ICS and Worlds books are still canon I know) which do not give anything close to that population. Nor would it make sense - the air traffic around Coruscant is nowhere near close enough to the level that would be needed to supply such a population.

We are generally seeing the Imperial Palace and presumably the high class districts around it. For NIMBY and security reasons traffic should be less there. There could be whole continents worth of basically uninhabited areas where automated industry/logistics/life support are handled. There could be whole skylines of space elevators or the SW version skyhooks pumping material back and forth near constantly from orbital space stations. Also the benefit of thousands of kilometers of city scape is there is plenty of capacity within it to house any manor of transport network. Perhaps ever 100kms there is a 1knm layer of dedicated transport infrastructure with vertical feeders up and down? You would probably have to pump atmosphere up and down depending on how much the built the cityscape into or above the original crust. That or whole bands or layers of the city are inhabited only by the species that can naturally handle the specific atmosphere conditions of a particular layer of the cityscape. In the same vain the bottom regions might not be light-less barely inhabited subterranean dungeons but rather utopias to any number of SW universe species that consider such a space ideal. This is actually making the logistics nerd in me drool.

As for power generation I believe most of that will be done in orbit and beamed down somehow. This planet is going to have a very big problem with heat, you might as well only put the energy used into the planets environment and keep the the heat of inefficient power sources out of the equation. Even then you will still probably be exporting heat from the surface.

I believe there was an in depth discussion about how Coruscant was supplied somewhere around here. If you want to do a simple scaling of the size of the container ships used to supply modern Earth nations to supporting tens to hundreds of trillions of beings you end up with thousands of moon sized vessels entering the system. I started a fanfic once about how such ships were prohibited from entering the inner system due to their mass interfering with orbital mechanics. They were basically interlocked masses of billions of inter modal containers and solid blocks of raw materials of hundreds of cubic kilometers pushed by giant hyperspace ferries. These were assembled at neighbor planet-less star systems near to Coruscant and the whole giant mess was then kickstarted into hyperspace by attaching the hyperspace ferry to a stellar tap. They were met by slightly less gigantic sublight ferries at the systems fringes and were broken down incrementally to smaller and smaller bundles and ferries until batches only a hundred kilometers in diameter were attached to orbiting skyhook stations to be shuttled to the surface by repulsor conduits to the surface. The idea then was that ever 1000km square patch of the surface had a dedicated skyhook to avoid planetary distribution as much as possible.

[Vance]

Indeed, seeing as the principle source of a 4000-5000km thick cityscape is a cancelled game the evidence for city growth on that scale is a bit shaky.

The game, 1313 isn't the primary evidence for this, but it may have been the first media to suggest that Coruscant is urbanized to the core. But the case I make on the website is really based on To Catch a Jedi, and supported by Dark Disciple.

Nor would it make sense - the air traffic around coruscant is nowhere near close enough to the level that would be needed to supply such a population.

Actually, I think it might be. One of the objections to Curtis Saxtons estimates for the population of a Coruscant that is covered by city (but not filled with city) was that the air traffic required to feed the population would "blacken out the skies", or something to that effect. Curtis disproved this notion by showing that you could feed the population with only a handful of kilometre wide cuboid ships, or I think several hundred smaller ones. So the required fleets would barely even be noticeable. The fact that the air traffic is so very dense not only in the planets clouds, but in the underworlds also, is kind of in-line with a planet urbanized to the core, supporting a population of hundreds or thousands of trillions.

Also, if you are referring to the air traffic due to native population, then consider that the entire planets air-car population isn't going to be above ground. Air traffic is present in each of inhabited city levels.

On the other hand, speculatively, perhaps the lower levels aren't actually urbanized, and contain massive hydroponic and energy production establishments?

Certainly possible. We know that at the very least, Level 01 is uninhabited; the level that is supposedly at or near the planets "core". Level 1312, 1313, and 1315 are all inhabited though, in TCW.

[Vance]

I was a bit off on the number of ships needed to feed Coruscant in my last post.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant

"In his personal web site and newsgroup postings, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, respected author of the Black Fleet Crisis novels, objected to the common picture of Coruscant's population and terrain. He expressed disbelief that such a planet could be ecologically viable. He exclaimed that the consumable imports “would turn the skies black with space freighters”. Fortunately this pessimism proves unfounded on closer, quantitative inspection. The worlds of STAR WARS are not closed ecological systems; each can be sustained by superscience recycling technologies and material imports mined and farmed from the countless multitudes of unsettled systems. The problem of freighters in the sky depends on the average size and capacity of cargo ships. Assuming a daily consumption of several kg of food per citizen, the needs of the entire planet-city can be met by either a large number of small ships or a small number of large ships. Even if there was no recycling or indoor agriculture on Coruscant, the daily needs of all residents could be met by the following kinds of solutions:

ships per day capacity per ship approx sky area (all ships)
1 15 km cube 2 × 108 m²
1000 1.5 km cube 2 × 109 m²
1000000 150 m cube 2 × 1010 m²
The total sky area of the planet is about 5 × 1014 m² (assuming that it is Earth-sized), so even if the daily food freighters are only as large as medium freighters and they all arrive simultaneously by the millions they will still not cover more than a tiny fraction of a percent of the sky. Bigger ships would dominate the sky much less. In practice, ships would not arrive at just one time in the day; recycling technology would be high; many of the imports would arrive via skyhook elevators; and ecosystems would thrive in the dank depths at ground level.

The orbital view of Coruscant seen in the first trailer for The Phantom Menace contains evidence of massive traffic surrounding the city-world. On the horizon, countless moving space vessels give the planet a kind of halo. Since so many of these ships are visible from thousands of kilometres away (and they are more distinct in the cinema version of the trailer) they must be miles in size."

Increase these needs by a 100 or so for a "city filled planet" as opposed to "only city covered", and the skies might actually be densely populated by ships like they are in the films?

[Thanas]

That is missing the point on a massive scale. Just think about the heavy traffic we need to sustain our "primitive" lifestyle in the west. Traffic - whether it is depicted on the lower levels or the upper levels is much closer to jammed highways than massive industrial traffic we have in society today. It is not just about feeding the population. It is also about goods travel in and out, much less about people needing to travel themselves. Just look at the massive traffic infrastructure a city like New York requires.

[Patroklos]

That in infrastructure devoid of droids and other AIs for optimization of transit not to mention one restricted to basically a 2D (rail, road and sea) system with small exceptions that only cover a minor portion of tonage moved. SW has repulsors for trivial precision 3d movement at what appears to be trivial power usage. Also you are assuming people actually move around as much as we do. At SW tech levels I imagine most people live in the equivalent of self contained arcocologies on Coruscant. We are probably seeing the exceptions in the movies. The rich exceptions.

[Thanas]

That in infrastructure devoid of droids and other AIs for optimization of transit not to mention one restricted to basically a 2D (rail, road and sea) system with small exceptions that only cover a minor portion of tonage moved. SW has repulsors for trivial precision 3d movement at what appears to be trivial power usage. Also you are assuming people actually move around as much as we do.

So? None of that changes the fact that stuff needs to be brought in and brought out.

At SW tech levels I imagine most people live in the equivalent of self contained arcocologies on Coruscant. We are probably seeing the exceptions in the movies. The rich exceptions.

Why would you do so? There is no support for that idea. Even people with menial jobs or low-paying ones regularly moved around. There is no evidence for ARKs at all.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, speculatively, perhaps the lower levels aren't actually urbanized, and contain massive hydroponic and energy production establishments?

Even if the lower levels of Coruscant consist of the hydroponics facilities to feed its population, and even if virtually all resources on the planet are extensively recycled, I'm pretty sure you still wouldn't need a thousand kilometer thick shell of industrial facilities to support the ten-or-so kilometer thick layer of cityscape we see on Coruscant.

Plus, at some point, it would just plain make more economic sense to build spacegoing hab stations somewhere else in the Coruscant system. If you build your factory or farm five hundred kilometers underground, shipping the products of your facility in and out become prohibitive. Much easier to do it if you're in a space station, because it's easier for fast, high-performance spacecraft to 'fly' up to your loading dock than it is for the equivalent of cargo trucks to 'drive' up.

This is a general extension of how the population of Coruscant we see mostly lives in very tall, isolated towers, which permit flying vehicles to approach and enter the tower at nearly any level. If those towers were dependent entirely on access by way of the ground (people walking into the building, trucks driving into ground-level loading docks), the entire interior of the lower floors of the building would have to be a solid mass of elevator shafts intended to permit access to the upper floors.

At some point, there simply isn't any purpose in building your skyscrapers any higher unless you have flying vehicles to permit access. And given how easy it is to fly into planetary orbit in Star Wars, you don't have to get much taller than that before it makes more sense to just live in an orbital habitat and commute to work (or build your farm in a habitat and commute to work from the ground).

[Purple]

What makes you all think that just because star wars tech is as it is now it had to have been the same way when the city was first being built? That would imply that it was built from the ground up at some point as opposed to being gradually built over a huge period of time. I would not at all be surprised if the initial construction was done using a much weaker tech base and than additional levels were piled in with more tech and support structure thrown in to reinforce the old systems up until the inner most floors ended up being a massive patchwork of various repairs.

[Elheru Aran]

While normally I'd rather shoot one of my nuts off, I actually agree with Purple. Coruscant has been settled for millennia, and it's quite possible that many of the lower levels date from distant periods where the planet had to supply a certain proportion of its own resources rather than depending on imports.