Kinetos and I decided to geek out a tad. We both love figuring out how things work in Star Wars. Pointless? Maybe. But realistic details make for a good setting. Kinetos had brought up how small Star Wars freighters seem to be compared to Earth container transports, and it went from there. Then I thought of how Coruscant likely needs all its food imported since there aren't any farms to grow food there, and was worried if it was even possible or if it was just a flaw in the Star Wars universe. So let's see how this works out.

Coruscant has roughly 1,000,000,000,000 inhabitants, or 1 trillion(but zeros make things impressive). In the United States of America, the average person eats 1 ton of food a year. Let us assume humans are a base average for all the species big and small. So we need to get 1 trillion tons of food to Coruscant a year.

Well, let's say the Action VI Transport is an average for bulk freighters. 90,000 ton cargo capacity. 1000000000/90000 = 11111111 Action VI transports per year, 11.1 million. Divided by 368, a Coruscant year = 30193 per day.

Now here is where we worried that Coruscant might not be able to handle thirty thousand transports per day just for food, which wouldn't even be counting all the non-food transports, non-transport civilian ships, and military craft. So we thought about it carefully. We decided a spaceport could handle about the same amount of traffic as a real airport does. So we said a single, large spaceport could handle 1000 ships a day. So, 32 spaceports for food transports. That's really not unrealistic, we have a lot of large airports here on Earth and only a fraction of our surface is covered by a city.

Food production is another matter, but easily explained away. Many planets produce large amounts of food. Kinetos and I, both being fans of the Thrawn Trilogy, immediately thought of Ukio. A planet devoted to producing food for the core worlds. It is the planet Thrawn tricked into believing they could fire through a planetary shield.

We can just safely assume there are enough bulk freighters produced in the galaxy to meet Coruscant's needs.

So there we have it. You could feed Coruscant by importing all its food, using canon vessels. A very large portion of that traffic you see in the sky is probably food transports. Just thought I'd share our silly findings with everyone for giggles.

Cool. I wonder if the people who invent the Star Wars universe thought things out as much as you guys do. Hmmmm.

At any rate, I have a Q and A regarding supplying Coruscant with necessities. It's much shorter though.

Q: What about Coruscant water supply?

A:

Coruscant has HUGE polar ice caps, which are the source for the city/planet's water. However, is this the only water source on Coruscant? That kind of lends itself to some other questions too.

Aha, aha

Using the U.S. as a basis for your food intake is a pretty skewed statistic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... rgy_intake

Yes indeed Yuke, the polar caps provide much if not all the water to fit Coruscant's needs. You also have Savvam Lake, but that's for recreation, it's not a reservoir.

Finding out how much water Coruscant needs is a lot harder though. Humans are supposed to drink 64oz a day, which translates to 182 trillion gallons a year for those 1 trillion people, but I doubt everyone drinks as much as they should.

@Mav

Yes I did think about that, since most of Coruscant's population is probably poor and eating less than most Americans. However I chose the U.S. for that very reason. It's the worst case scenario, trying to feed a trillion beings who eat a ton a year. If that can be done, then anything less is possible as well. The goal was not to find out how much Coruscant actually eats, but to see if feeding it is possible using canon freighters.

THEWULFMAN wrote:Yes indeed Yuke, the polar caps provide much if not all the water to fit You also have Savvam Lake, but that's for recreation, it's not a reservoir.

That might make a cool mod map.

THEWULFMAN wrote:Yes I did think about that, since most of Coruscant's population is probably poor and eating less than most Americans. However I chose the U.S. for that very reason. It's the worst case scenario, trying to feed a trillion beings who eat a ton a year. If that can be done, then anything less is possible as well. The goal was not to find out how much Coruscant actually eats, but to see if feeding it is possible using canon freighters.

If you're assessing worst-case scenarios, perhaps you should look at more "realistic" estimations of Coruscant's population, instead of going with the likely-lowball 1 trillion (i.e. 10^14-15, instead of 10^12):
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Cor ... e2#Food.3F

Also:
http://irregularwebcomic.net/386.html

THEWULFMAN wrote:The goal was not to find out how much Coruscant actually eats, but to see if feeding it is possible using canon freighters.

Well if you're finding if it's possible instead of factoring in what they would actually eat, then wouldn't you use the best case scenario for accomplishing the task rather than the worst? (IE using the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive for calculations rather than how much food the average gluttonous first-world country eats).

I'll get my math goggles on...

I love things like this, nice find guys!

Twilight_Warrior wrote:

THEWULFMAN wrote:The goal was not to find out how much Coruscant actually eats, but to see if feeding it is possible using canon freighters.

Well if you're finding if it's possible instead of factoring in what they would actually eat, then wouldn't you use the best case scenario for accomplishing the task rather than the worst? (IE using the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive for calculations rather than how much food the average gluttonous first-world country eats).

That actually is what Wulf did. He used America as his reference.

Maveritchell wrote:f you're assessing worst-case scenarios, perhaps you should look at more "realistic" estimations of Coruscant's population, instead of going with the likely-lowball 1 trillion (i.e. 10^14-15, instead of 10^12):
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Cor ... e2#Food.3F

Also:
http://irregularwebcomic.net/386.html

I'm aware the estimations are likely low, but the point was to figure out if it could work in the canon of Star Wars. We simply don't know the population density. The industrial and commercial zones are likely very large as well. We are shown a very large industrial area in Attack of the Clones.

Twilight_Warrior wrote:Well if you're finding if it's possible instead of factoring in what they would actually eat, then wouldn't you use the best case scenario for accomplishing the task rather than the worst? (IE using the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive for calculations rather than how much food the average gluttonous first-world country eats).

The problem with that is we know not everyone on Coruscant is eating the bare minimum, most of them are not. Coruscant is a very wealthy planet, with a large amount of people living comfortably. Sure, once you get to the lower levels people are poor and can't eat as much.

Calculating for the worst-case scenario(1 ton per person a year) ensures it can be done, while doing the reverse gives us numbers that don't guarantee it's possible to ship the needed food.

yuke5 wrote:That actually is what Wulf did. He used America as his reference.

Actually he meant that I shouldn't use America as a reference, you silly penguin. :u

THEWULFMAN wrote:

Twilight_Warrior wrote:Well if you're finding if it's possible instead of factoring in what they would actually eat, then wouldn't you use the best case scenario for accomplishing the task rather than the worst? (IE using the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive for calculations rather than how much food the average gluttonous first-world country eats).

The problem with that is we know not everyone on Coruscant is eating the bare minimum, most of them are not. Coruscant is a very wealthy planet, with a large amount of people living comfortably. Sure, once you get to the lower levels people are poor and can't eat as much.

Calculating for the worst-case scenario(1 ton per person a year) ensures it can be done, while doing the reverse gives us numbers that don't guarantee it's possible to ship the needed food.

Well, yes, it worked this time, but let's say it didn't. You'd have to do more and more calculations of different amounts of food per person per year until you found one that fit that was within the survivable range. Sure, Americans eat an average of one tonne a year, but that's not what the human body absolutely needs to survive (or, at least, maintain a healthy lifestyle). According to the USDA, the amount of food the average human needs to meet the daily minimum requirements is 4.7 pounds a day, which translates to 1715 pounds a year, which about 300 pounds less food per year (or 500, depending on if you're using the US tonne of 2000 pounds or the metric tonne of 2204.62 pounds). And when it comes to 1,000,000,000,000 people, that's a heck of a lot less food required.

If you were to redo the calculations with TheForce.net's 10^14 estimate rather than your 10^12, it would make more mathematical sense to test for that 1715 pounds to see if it's feasible, rather than starting at the top of the range and working down until a number works that is greater than or equal to 1715.

There's a flaw here that's cultural and not mathematical. We don't know what Coruscantians eat, nor how food is produced in Star Wars. Sure there are planets with farms, but basing an urban worlds food supply on the agrarian ways of certain planets is unrealistic. What if everything that Coruscantians eat can be made in a factory? If so, Coruscantians is set for life. And what if there are farms on Coruscant? It doesn't need to be on the surface to be a farm - it can be a well-lit underground farm, or any number of other (including fictional) possibilities.

We're actually putting research into industrial farming now.

http://www.verticalfarm.com/

Grev wrote:We don't know what Coruscantians eat, nor how food is produced in Star Wars.

I think there are a couple logical issues with the initial post, but I don't think this is one of them. We do have some idea what kind of food is eaten in Star Wars:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Food
...and we have a reasonable abstraction of how it's produced (pretty much just like we know it to be - Star Wars society is fairly similar to ours organizationally, it just has magic technology and larger scales to deal with).

The bigger issue would be the biodiversity of sapient Coruscanti species (e.g. are there a lot of the Gand species on Coruscant? They eat much differently than the human/near-human species). That being said, I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to push forward with that the vast majority of Coruscant eats like humans, since we don't have an existing model for food consumption of any non-Earth type of life.

There's no problem with simplifying data to make more general assumptions, but the problem with the initial theory is that data wasn't just simplified, it was scaled differently (i.e. overly conservative on the population estimate and overly liberal on the food consumption quantity per capita).

THEWULFMAN wrote:

Maveritchell wrote:f you're assessing worst-case scenarios, perhaps you should look at more "realistic" estimations of Coruscant's population, instead of going with the likely-lowball 1 trillion (i.e. 10^14-15, instead of 10^12):
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Cor ... e2#Food.3F

Also:
http://irregularwebcomic.net/386.html

I'm aware the estimations are likely low, but the point was to figure out if it could work in the canon of Star Wars. We simply don't know the population density. The industrial and commercial zones are likely very large as well. We are shown a very large industrial area in Attack of the Clones.

You can't say "I'm going to guess worst-case" for food consumption and then say "I'm going to guess best-case" for population. If you want to cover all your bases, fine, guess "worst-case" for everything. If you want to see whether it's even at all possible (i.e. Mythbusters' third strike) guess "best-case" for everything.

And if you want to use single examples (i.e. "very large...industrial and commercial zones"), we've seen that Coruscant is a stacked city in many places (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUY-x4zH0Kk), which would multiply its surface area (given that all estimates above use Earth cities for population density references) many times over.

Meh. You have a point, again I was just going with canon sources on that figure. Heh, Mythbusters. Well I've appreciated you joining in on this random discussion.

Talking about Coruscant's surface area, I wonder how much larger the planet is compared to when the city was small and the natural planetary surface was still visible. If this image from 1313 is any accurate indicator on how far the urban pileup goes, it's like building up Mercury until it's as large as Earth. That's increasing the planet's size by a factor of 2.6!



Mercury, Mars, Earth (to scale, credit: NASA), with Coruscant overlaid (for relative scale, credit Star Wars: 1313). Calculations made from dimentions listed on Wikipedia.

I thought about that, and I have a different theory. Rather than building the planet up, they dug down. The reason I say this is because there are still geographical features seen on Coruscant, and if the entire surface was built up like that, there would be none.

Also, it would have been very inconvenient to build it up that much, there's no reason it would have been so popular if the planet was that small to begin with. That's like going to an alien star system, finding a mercury sized planet with no atmosphere to speak of (too little gravity) and deciding to build a metropolis there. It simply wouldn't happen. Not to mention the fact Coruscant has two sizable moons, that of which a planet the size of Mercury probably couldn't have captured one way or another, they're too big of moons.

Now, don't get too caught up on my use of Mercury as an example, as it was only to demonstrate relative scale. However, to show the amazing diversity of astronomy, Titan, one of Saturn's moons, is only slightly larger than Mercury (2576 km vs
2439km) and has an atmosphere denser than Earth's though it only has a fraction of the gravity (0.14g). Pluto, smaller than Mercury, has 5 moons, one of which (Charon) is fully half the size of Pluto. Also, a lower gravity could have led to earlier space travel,and close proximity in the densely planeted core to other habitable worlds could have led to easy colonization, making Coruscant the central hub it has become to be known.

So it is possible that Coruscant could have started out as a Mercury-sized habitable planet, not that I was initially trying to prove that point. It is also possible that Coruscant started out as an Earth-sized planet and they increased it's size 2.6 times over the eons. I was just marvelling at the surprising depth of the cityscape (and all the implications it suggests) assuming the screenshot is to scale and not exaggerated for visual effect.


But I also wonder if your idea of building down into the crust is plausible. Wizards of the Coast RPG stats list Coruscant's mean radius as 6,120 km, compared to Earth's radius of 6,371 km. We'll assume that their geologic structure is comparable. The earth's crust (lithosphere) into which you could plausibly excavate is listed to be about 60km thick. Mercury's radius is 2440 km, which compared with the earth, is a difference of 3931 km. So that means that the cityscape would have tunnelled almost 4000 km into the center of Coruscant. In Earth terms, that would mean that you would excavate fully through the lava-filled mantle and halfway into the liquid-hot-metal outer core.

However, we've seen surprising real-world astronomical phenomena in just this discussion alone, so that's not to count out the idea that Coruscant has an exceptionally thick crust, akin to Naboo which supposedly is cavernous solid rock (according to Episode I: The Complete Guide to the Incredible Locations). Star Wars is fiction and can do what it wants. It's just crazy to imagine the possibilities.





Wow. That was one geek-rant. Thanks for sparking the discussion!