Coruscant urbanized it's core?

[Patroklos]

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

No, but it does change how they do it, and the SW universe has quite a few ways to accomplish this. For instance, transport through the planet for instance.

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.

Why would they not? There is as much support for than as there is you "just like Manhattan but with taller buildings" extrapolation regarding traffic. What would ground traffic look like in Manhattan if there was a mirror transport network ever ten stories up (and thus in each one of those mirror networks as well)?

[Thanas]

There is no source besides a cancelled game that agrees with the theory of Coruscant being urbanized throughout. Meanwhile, we have a whole mountain of EU that doesn't agree with it. Neither the description of the destruction of Coruscant under the Vong or the description of it in the X-wing series match. Even worse, we have sources stating that Centerpoint Station is the largest artificial construct in existence.

Unless you can actually pull a source that states that Coruscant is hollowed out I see no reason to believe it, especially when things that would be better located downstairs (like the whole industrial district) are not. Nevermind we never see dockyards large enough on the scale of modern megaports, which also points to there not being transport in the numbers as you claim there to be.

So unless you got a source, I am not going to be convinced otherwise.

[Patroklos]

When did I say the planet was hollowed out? When did I make any claim to the extent of the cityscape or the population contained within other to use the range provided by other posters? Nothing I have said really changes whether you are at the minimum or maximum of estimates given.

Why would one compair center point station to a cityscape? Do we consider NYC to be an object?

What percentage of the surface of Coruscant have we observed? What percent of that was at a detail great enough to disqualify dockyards or elevators? You are in fact wrong in this respect. We see a dockyard in EPII where the refugee ships leave from and then again in EPIII where Anikin crashes a warship onto one. Since we know the size of that warship that spaceport is dozens of kilometers long on one side at least.

We are both speculating here. I am not climbing what IS the case as I think we can both agree the sources are quiet on these question. We can say that some things are not the case like the sky not being blacked out by transport over a small percentage of the sky for instance. In the absence of evidence I am merely speculating on what could or should be the case based on what we see. I don't for instance claim arcocologies are canon or evidenced, only that they would make sense and a lot more so than you "insert modern city traffic need here" line of reasoning. I don't think that would hold even 100 years into our own future as a useful extrapolation.

[Thanas]

Again:
1. It is more logical that the 5k+ known levels are built up from the crust of the planet than that they went down to the core.
2. The population figures given by secondary sources of 1 trillion permanent residents and 3 trillion total population is more consistent with a non-hallowed planet. In fact, it is very low for an ecumenopolis and suggests that most of the lower levels are probably largely abandoned (something that fits with the clone wars depiction as well, ever notice how many empty buildings there are even below level 3000 in a city allegedly pressed for space?)

[Vance]

There is no source besides a cancelled game that agrees with the theory of Coruscant being urbanized throughout.
...

Unless you can actually pull a source that states that Coruscant is hollowed out
...
So unless you got a source, I am not going to be convinced otherwise.

The source is Dark Disciple, which is part of the new canon EU. It wrote:
Level 1313 was so named because it was one thousand, three hundred, and thirteen levels from the core of the planet. Voss suspected it was easier to think of it that way rather than focusing on the weight of almost four thousand other levels between oneself and the surface. The difference between Coruscant's literal and figurative "underworld" and the one that saw the sun was sufficiently stark that they might as well be located in two different systems. Crimes that would be viewed as appalling above were everyday occurrences here. The Jedi wondered, not for the first time, how many would be born, live, and die here, never having glimpsed the sun, let alone the stars.

And then there's to Catch a Jedi behind the scenes:
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Kfj2hEwDmTY/maxresdefault.jpg

As for the logistics of the situation, I suggest somebody proposes some kind of quantification before confirming or dismissing the feasibility of ecumenopolitan concepts. Personally I'm not convinced that a city-filled Coruscant that is urbanized to the core and home to hundreds-or-thousands of trillions of inhabitants is impossible considering what we've seen on screen so far, and there does seem to be some [canon] evidence to suggest that Coruscant is urban to the core -- it isn't only 1313 the video game which depicts this. What we have seen of Coruscant does convince me that the 1-10 trillion population figure would is far too low.

[Purple]

Thing is, again even if we assume that the planet is completely urbanized to it's core we can't really know how much of that is still used or usable. And with a structure of that size and age things get very complicated indeed.
Unless it was literally built in a day the thing would have been built up over generations, if not millenia of steady growth. Levels which were once dedicated to industry or habitation might end up abandoned and filled in with concrete to act as foundations for those above whilst new brighter and larger ones are built to forever encase the once surface layer in darkness. And this need not be linear either. Maybe layer 4303 was a fine china production layer exporting trillions of plates to the galaxy at large only to have ceramics fall out of fashion and the level to end up abandoned. But by that time there were 5 new levels full of office space so repurposing it was not seen cost effective leaving the level abandoned. That sort of thing could happen! And it probably did at some point too. It certainly would have happened to various transportation, sewer or utility levels as new ones had to be built to sustain the ever growing city. For all we know much of the planet might well be uninhabited on account of abandoned areas and areas dedicated to automated utilities.

[Thanas]

There is no source besides a cancelled game that agrees with the theory of Coruscant being urbanized throughout.
...

Unless you can actually pull a source that states that Coruscant is hollowed out
...
So unless you got a source, I am not going to be convinced otherwise.

The source is Dark Disciple, which is part of the new canon EU. It wrote:
Level 1313 was so named because it was one thousand, three hundred, and thirteen levels from the core of the planet. Voss suspected it was easier to think of it that way rather than focusing on the weight of almost four thousand other levels between oneself and the surface. The difference between Coruscant's literal and figurative "underworld" and the one that saw the sun was sufficiently stark that they might as well be located in two different systems. Crimes that would be viewed as appalling above were everyday occurrences here. The Jedi wondered, not for the first time, how many would be born, live, and die here, never having glimpsed the sun, let alone the stars.

And then there's to Catch a Jedi behind the scenes:
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Kfj2hEwDmTY/maxresdefault.jpg

The sources are not in agreement and clash with the (still canon) worlds book. In fact, the sources even contradict each other. One speaks of the surface of the planet (not mantle, not crust, not core). And from the screenshot it seems to be more the case that these levels are a geogrpahical unit instead of habitable space.

[Patroklos]

Hmmm, spheres withing spheres. That would change things but its also shitty world building.

[Sea Skimmer]

If the urbanization was more then around ~20,000ft thick it would require planet spanning flawless systems of air locks to maintain multiple levels of pressure zones. Otherwise humans would start getting the bends traveling between levels, as well as many other problems. We see utterly no evidence of this anywhere in the EU.

[Purple]

This of course is assuming that they are inhabited. If we go by my theory of levels being abandoned as the urbanization expands we might not see that or see it exist but not need mentioning.

[Patroklos]

Have we ever really scene someone go between 20K feet worth of levels before in a single scene? That is why I mentioned having to pump atmosphere between levels though. Given we see humans walking around without breathing assistance outside the Imperial Palace which by all accounts is at the apex of Coruscants spires that should give us a maximum height for the cityscape assuming earth like size and geography.

The Death Zone for humans operating in Earth's atmosphere is at 8,000m, and that's for seasoned mountain climbers for short periods of time. The average human would have to be well below to live an normal uninhibited life as we see them doing in the outside shots in the PT.

[Simon_Jester]

Right.

And this is particularly hard to finesse with high technology. With the right unobtainium bracing you could undermine the planetary crust with tunnels and have it not collapse, sure... but the only way to prevent air pressure issues would be to hermetically seal the lower levels of the city from the upper layers and force all traffic to pass through airlocks or the like.

Otherwise, well. Imagine doing this on Earth.

Earth's atmosphere has a scale height of 8500 meters, which means that if you go up that high above sea level, the density of the atmosphere decreases by a factor of e (about 2.7). So the pressure at 8500 meters is 1/2.7 atmospheres, or about 36.8% of one atmosphere. Hence it being 'death pressure.'

This is before you factor in any change in pressure caused by the air getting colder at high altitude, which is a good thing because we're talking about an ecumenopolis that is presumably maintaining a climate-controlled environment at all levels.

Correspondingly, if you dug a hole 8500 meters deep, the air pressure in the bottom of the hole would also change by a factor of e... specifically, it would be e times larger. So the pressure would be 2.7 atmospheres instead of one atmosphere.

This is a natural consequence of how atmospheres behave in a gravitational field- it doesn't actually matter how large the volume of the hole is.

Moreover, human beings cannot survive indefinitely in air with an atmospheric pressure of more than about three or four atmospheres, unless of course you artificially decrease the concentration of oxygen and mix in other gases. So the limit of how deep you can build is about 8500*ln(3 or 4) equals about ten or twelve kilometers down. I say this since presumably the air composition in Coruscant is the same at all levels of the metropolis outside of, maybe a few "Little Chlorinebreatherstan" regions occupied by minority alien races. If humans can breathe it at the surface in one atmosphere air, they can't breathe it more than about ten kilometers below that point.

In other words, assuming that all parts of the Coruscant city-scape can exchange air more or less freely, there must be some "reference altitude" somewhere in there, at which the atmospheric pressure is roughly the same as Earth's at sea level.

Humans would not be able to live comfortably more than about five or six kilometers above this altitude, nor would they be able to live comfortably more than ten or twelve kilometers below it.

Now, if you try to deal with this by adding more air to the planet or taking air away, all that accomplishes is raising or lowering the "reference altitude-" if you take away half the atmosphere, then you open up for habitation an area roughly five kilometers deep underground, but at the cost of removing about five kilometers of habitable area at the top by making the air too thin. The reverse happens if you double the air pressure.

About the only way you could possibly counter this would be by effectively 'segregating' the layers of urban buildup into multiple separate atmospheres that cannot freely exchange gases at a meaningful rate (i.e. you can pump air OUT of the bottom levels faster than air flows INTO them).

The kind of massive force field doors used in certain types of hangar bays in Star Wars might work, since we know those can be made large and still hold in an atmosphere of pressure. But it would be yet another kind of major urban infrastructure, and if it broke down you might well experience very intense winds sucking air 'down' into the lower parts of the city.

[Darth Tanner]

I doubt maintaining artificial air pressures would be that challenging on a planet where the entire atmosphere would have to be constantly filtered for multiple trillions of people’s exhalations and trackless industrial pollution as well as being air conditioned to prevent all that energy build up by a civilization that can maintain shields that keep water/vacuum out as casually as using solid walls and can also maintain planet scale shields from single facilities.

Plus all the sources would appear to show the 'level's being segregated to the point maintaining only small portals of free flowing traffic between them, thus making air pressure much less of an issue between them.

[Purple]

There is absolutely no reason to assume that there are no airlocks involved. We have time and time again seen them use force fields for the purpose after all. So even if you had a million and one entrance to each level you could just fit a force field on the door like what is done with hangars.

[Elheru Aran]

This might be relevant. How many levels did they cover in the Zam Wessell chase in AOTC? They went from Padme's apartments, in the high-class levels, to a fairly low "ground" level, including Anakin sky-diving for something like... 30 seconds? A quick Google for 'speed of a skydiver' suggests a terminal velocity of 250 ft/s; 30 seconds is ~7500 ft (assuming no wind, immediate acceleration to terminal velocity from the landspeeder, and Earth-normal gravity and atmospheric pressure). Assuming that a standard 'story' is 12 ft, that's... 625 stories' worth of fall. *shrugs* I don't know if that's useful, but it's worth considering, especially as they may actually go *lower* in order to get to the bar where they finally catch the bounty hunter.

[Patroklos]

However many it is its trivial compared to the other numbers thrown around. People are talking about thousands of kms of citiscape here I don't think we see anywhere near 30s of straight down falling that entire sequence and they go up at several points. Even if it was as you say 625 stories is only four Burj Khalifas.

What I found interesting about that scene related to this topic is how sparse the towers are for that distance down in every direction. It might well be that the cityscape is rather thin for tens to hundreds to thousands (whatever your take) of kilometers before resembling the airtight planet wide layer cake some envision. Whose to say a good bit of the cityscape isn't directly on the surface?

[Me2005]

What I found interesting about that scene related to this topic is how sparse the towers are for that distance down in every direction. It might well be that the cityscape is rather thin for tens to hundreds to thousands (whatever your take) of kilometers before resembling the airtight planet wide layer cake some envision. Whose to say a good bit of the cityscape isn't directly on the surface?

I think this is what you guys are missing. It's possible (likely) that there are spikes of city going deep into the core, just like there are spikes of city going up toward space, with the bulk of the city's volume being in a layer a few km deep and mostly on the surface of the old world. Those deep spikes would probably also be in regions akin to the Marianas trench on Earth.

I believe I remember reading that Coruscant's twin, Trantor from The Foundation, had vast storehouses below the surface with utilities spires and etc. scattered spaceward of the city (which was largely closed in as described, unlike Coruscant which seems to be more open-air) and similar spires coreward for some utility purpose. It is very likely that Coruscant is similar.

The question that doesn't answer is "What moron decided that level 01 should be the core of the planet?" Maybe it describes altitude or something and is useful for air/space traffic, maybe it settled some ancient dispute about what 01 should be when combining city-states that spanned only most of the planet.

[Patroklos]

I don't think this is the case here but on the off chance that two downward developments counting levels from the surface met each other at the core that could prompt a renumber. Actually even if a transit corridor through the core existed this could make sense, with the first few thousand being meaningless to anything other than mile markers for the shaft.

[Simon_Jester]

I like the transit shaft idea. Coruscant almost certainly has hypervelocity subways that allow long distance transportation. Granted that Star Wars has incredibly capable suborbital spacelift capability, but you'd still have to worry about air traffic control and causing sonic booms over populated areas and so on. A very fast subway would be a logical response, especially for things like bulk cargo transportation.

I doubt maintaining artificial air pressures would be that challenging on a planet where the entire atmosphere would have to be constantly filtered for multiple trillions of people’s exhalations and trackless industrial pollution as well as being air conditioned to prevent all that energy build up by a civilization that can maintain shields that keep water/vacuum out as casually as using solid walls and can also maintain planet scale shields from single facilities.

The main issue is that these are different systems. Keeping the air breathable and clean is one system that you need to have. Having radiators is another system that runs separately. Keeping the air pressure adequate is yet a third system.

It's not that you can't do this in Star Wars, it's that it creates yet another major obstacle to building that heavily on a single planet... and correspondingly makes it more likely that the excess population and industry that would otherwise move into these super-subterranean levels would instead move into space stations.

Plus all the sources would appear to show the 'level's being segregated to the point maintaining only small portals of free flowing traffic between them, thus making air pressure much less of an issue between them.

Although this may be true, it does place a limit on the height of the surface-based skyscraper city we actually see in Coruscant during Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Because we could probably SEE if there were a giant world-girdling force field ball that was keeping the atmosphere from being intolerably dense at the base of the skyscrapers, or conversely one holding in the atmosphere to make it dense at the tops of the towers. So the "open air" layer has to be no more than about fifteen kilometers thick, even if there are fully enclosed layers below there.