- Location
- Do you really care?
So do you want the numbers to actually matter or don't you? Because that seems like it would contradict itself and now I'm a bit confused.
Cliches you can't stand
- Thread starter Mithras
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Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
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- He/Him
They want the numbers to both be simplified and to matter; 87.201892 vs 87.201893 is silly to them, but 10 vs 5 is not.
A lot of LitRPG stuff fills space with literally worthless numbers. Having 12.28675 in Underwater Basket Weaving is completely meaningless if you're doing a combat story.
(Things can go too far the other way, where the numbers are the only thing that matters; this completely erases any tension as, if you know what the involved sets of stats are, the outcome is always inevitable.)
- Location
- Do you really care?
Alright, fair enough, I suppose.
Sci-Fi city planets with authors that can't be bothered to do the math of how many people would actually live there. For example, Starwars' Coruscant cannonically has 3 Trillion people, but if you apply the population density of the real city of Manila, which while big has nothing on Coruscant's scale building wise, across an Earth sized planet you get 23.5 Trillion. So either Coruscant is a tiny barely moon sized planetoied or everyone's living in mansion sized apartments with entire districts completely vacant.
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- Do you really care?
While science-fiction writers are notoriously bad at math, that's just as thoughtless in its own way. Coruscant has to have barely-inhabited sections dedicated to growing food and processing waste, because otherwise, it would need to have hundreds of moon-sized ships transporting in food and water on a daily basis and carting out entire oceans worth of feces on the way back. Manila is a city, it doesn't feed itself. A planet would have to.
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- Location
- Somewhere
Now, it should be noted that this is the population as of the end of the clone war. Which included the place suffering from not just orbital bombardment, but from crashed capitol ships, one of which is noted to have left a 16 kilometer crater in a populated area.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
As far as I know Coruscant does have thousands of ships bringing in food every day. But yes large parts of it is barely inhabited industrial zones or abandoned areas as far as I know.
- Location
- Georgia, US
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- He/Him
I don't think this necessarily follows either, a planet would not have to feed itself in Star Wars. This is a setting where there's casual interstellar travel and advanced refrigeration. It would be entirely viable for Coruscant to feed its populace with imported food. Which would make sense given that there are canonical agriworlds, a concept that only works if you're able to ship meaningful amounts of food across interstellar distances (otherwise why bother to specialize this way? Unless there's another planet literally in the same solar system you wouldn't have anyone to send your produce to).
There are still reasons for Coruscant to dedicate space to functions that are not habitation (as you say waste processing would be a major issue) but food growing isn't one of them.
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Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
I mean, droids. 3 trillion sounds perfectly fine to me if that's just counting organics and droids just aren't considered in the census.
I'm envisioning huge stretches of semi-automated industrial areas which have maybe a hundred or so organic workers but shit-tons of droids.
- Location
- Georgia, US
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- He/Him
Coruscant was the seat of galactic power and economic might for millennia, I think they can handle millions of ships.
Don't get me wrong, it wouldn't be a simple affair and logistically that kind of world could afford zero fuck ups in its delivery system. A blockade or any other disruptive event would be an existential threat, however that isn't necessarily incompatible with canon. It's not like there are a bunch of city-planets. Coruscant is consistently depicted as a special case due to its enormous importance. It makes sense if the difficulties of importing that much food would make forming a ecumenopolis incredibly difficult.
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- Location
- The Old Dominion
I can think of only a few planet cities in Star Wars and they are almost all in the core worlds.
One was apparently even a major political rival to Coruscant in the early days of the old republic as I recall to the point of fighting several major wars with Coruscant ala the Punic wars before being supplanted but without suffering ruin and destruction like Carthage.
Outside of the core worlds I can think of only two, Taris in the outer rim which gets destroyed via Sith orbital bombardment during knights of the old republic but apparently eventually regained its status as planet city by the time of the prequels and Nar Shaddaa in hut space which is more of a city moon than a city planet.
One was apparently even a major political rival to Coruscant in the early days of the old republic as I recall to the point of fighting several major wars with Coruscant ala the Punic wars before being supplanted but without suffering ruin and destruction like Carthage.
Outside of the core worlds I can think of only two, Taris in the outer rim which gets destroyed via Sith orbital bombardment during knights of the old republic but apparently eventually regained its status as planet city by the time of the prequels and Nar Shaddaa in hut space which is more of a city moon than a city planet.
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Ophelia
unpleasant
I only really care about that sort of thing if the story makes a point to, you, know point it out. Like how Fallout 3 was all about restoring clean water to DC... which begs the question of what other resources they might need... like food... and they have no farms...
To quote the late great Shamus Young, "WHAT DO THEY EAT?!"
But if the story is about, I don't know, magic space wizards with laser swords (except for that movie with magic space wizards with laser swords that's about tariff disputes for some reason), I generally give it a pass.
To quote the late great Shamus Young, "WHAT DO THEY EAT?!"
But if the story is about, I don't know, magic space wizards with laser swords (except for that movie with magic space wizards with laser swords that's about tariff disputes for some reason), I generally give it a pass.
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Ecumenopolis by definition can't have enough surface farms, so its either massive food imports, vertical farming, or a 'recycle poop to nutrient paste' pipeline. If I had to pick one for Coruscant it'd be the last, as 'the proles in the underbelly eat nutrient paste' feels very in line with typical SW worldbuilding.
Of course such a scenario still probably requires imports, as there is no way you can maintain the energy budget of an ecumenopolis on just surface irradiation. I guess you could run off geothermal for a time, as well as surface or subsurface water for fusion or fissible heavy elements, but the sort of scale Coruscant operates might deplete even those. Importing antimatter would be much more practical than importing food from elsewhere. Going for a dyson sphere seems more practical but SW doesn't really do those I think.
Of course such a scenario still probably requires imports, as there is no way you can maintain the energy budget of an ecumenopolis on just surface irradiation. I guess you could run off geothermal for a time, as well as surface or subsurface water for fusion or fissible heavy elements, but the sort of scale Coruscant operates might deplete even those. Importing antimatter would be much more practical than importing food from elsewhere. Going for a dyson sphere seems more practical but SW doesn't really do those I think.
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- Location
- Do you really care?
Honestly, I personally don't really care that much how it works, I just dislike it when people complain about bad math on the basis of even worse math. Factually speaking, something like Coruscant should not be able to exist. You think global warming is bad? Imagine that, but dialled up to the point that the surface of the planet should be molten slag. The sheer amount of thermal energy put out by all those living creatures and all the technology that keeps a city-planet running has to go somewhere and simply radiating it off into space could never possibly be enough. Greenhouse effect? More like blast furnace effect.
So yeah, it's really a waste of time to even think about, but that's fine as long as you at least acknowledge how little sense it makes.
So yeah, it's really a waste of time to even think about, but that's fine as long as you at least acknowledge how little sense it makes.
- Location
- New Mexico, USA
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- He/They
Per canon, the lowest levels of Coruscant are downright uninhabitable:
In addition, a whole bunch of it is machinery or just landfill; apparently the upper stories compress trash into blocks and just set it down on the ground or the lowest level of garbage such that entire regions of the underworld have a ground floor made up of hundreds of meters of trash rather than actual dirt or metal. The lower 50 or so floors are originally 100,000 years old, so either they must rebuild towers on occasion or duracrete is stupidly wear-resistant.
In addition, a whole bunch of it is machinery or just landfill; apparently the upper stories compress trash into blocks and just set it down on the ground or the lowest level of garbage such that entire regions of the underworld have a ground floor made up of hundreds of meters of trash rather than actual dirt or metal. The lower 50 or so floors are originally 100,000 years old, so either they must rebuild towers on occasion or duracrete is stupidly wear-resistant.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Water haulers? Maybe in the Outer Rim, but even with it's used future technology I'm sure even with used future technology they're already past that. All you need is to make plentiful oxygen fight even more plentiful hydrogen and water just happens. And I'm sure your average apartment has moisture vaporators to pull ambient moisture back into the pipes, considering how a dirt farmer on Tattooine can afford the things.
Septic freighters just seems silly. Once a civilisation is at a level that it can efficiently turn waste into other useful things I see no reason why they would ever look back.
I mean, the best answer is all of the above.
I think the idea that this would even be hard is pure earth bias. We're used to scarcity driven économies and governments who think they production and efficiency are gay and communist. There's no reason to think the Star Wars universe wouldn't have production beyond we can even dream of while still not even being post scarcity.
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When has Star Wars ever given the slightest indication that it has anything like that? As someone previously mentioned, Coruscant just presses garbage into bricks and dumps it into the deepest hole they can find. They're clearly not even interested basic recycling. Even if they have the technology to make something useful out of trillions of people's worth of bodily waste, they do not seem remotely willing to use it.
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
If I remember my lore correctly Taris was a giant city covering all the land. But unlike Coruscant it also had giant oceans where food was grown. I have no idea about the prequels era but in SWTOR it was an overgrown forest among the ruins.
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- Do you really care?
By the time of the battle of Yavin, only a small part of the planet had finally been rebuilt, due to all the crazy shit like Rakghouls and such that infested the ruins substantially interfering with reconstruction efforts.
- Location
- The Old Dominion
Hmm setting aside the matter of farms it is established that there are parks and gardens with various plants on Coruscant's surface some of which apparently preserve what's left of the native flora.
Though I suppose after tens of thousands of years I suppose the plants in said gardens and parks would likely be well be adopted to the Enviromental conditions of the city world.
Though I suppose after tens of thousands of years I suppose the plants in said gardens and parks would likely be well be adopted to the Enviromental conditions of the city world.
The Englanderish
Schrödinger's Kuudere Kitty Caliph(a)
- Location
- Califat de Chats
In terms of food, lorewise Coruscant relies on an entire series of nearby agricultural star systems all devoting their entire society to food production and export.
Though more broadly I would say pursuing sensible logistical details in SW is somewhat futile.
Though more broadly I would say pursuing sensible logistical details in SW is somewhat futile.
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The upper limit is energy though. My understanding is that in the densest places of human civilization the average energy consumption per square meter already exceeds the usable solar energy per square meter, which creates problems if you extrapolate to 'the whole surface of the planet that dense'. If you try to bypass that limit via non-renewables or imports you necessarily warm the planet to the point that you are also going to have to have a plan to export the waste heat or end up cooking your planet's inhabitants.
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