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I just played kotor 1 and absolutely loved the Taris section. What are some other media (besides the Star Wars prequels) with ecumenopolises?
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Jul 26, 2024 23:13
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Donglepuss posted:I just played kotor 1 and absolutely loved the Taris section. What are some other media (besides the Star Wars prequels) with ecumenopolises? The OG is probably asimovs foundation with the galactic empires homeworld of trantor.
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Jul 27, 2024 02:23
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Trantor and its fate is a stone cold classic. The Caves of Steel have a lot of the same energy even if they are a bit short of the full monty. Whats your favorite bit about Ecumenopoli? Unfortunately my memory is mostly picking up books that sort of throw one in as an afterthought. When you get tired of the classics check out Bill the Galactic Hero. The middle third is all about Ecumenopolise problems.
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Jul 28, 2024 09:18
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Does the Death Star count as one?
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Jul 28, 2024 21:00
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Madurai posted:Does the Death Star count as one? No. That's no moon.
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Jul 29, 2024 08:00
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Holy Terra in W40K would count, but I don't think anything really took place there in the W40K books and games.
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Jul 29, 2024 16:37
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TuxedoOrca posted:Holy Terra in W40K would count, but I don't think anything really took place there in the W40K books and games. One of the Space Wolf books takes place in Terra IIRC. I'd love to see a book that is like a whole atlas of a hive world. Necromunda is obviously focused in the underhive, but the Dark Heresy RPG got there a bit with its descriptions of Scintilla.
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Jul 29, 2024 21:08
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habituallyred posted:Trantor and its fate is a stone cold classic. The Caves of Steel have a lot of the same energy even if they are a bit short of the full monty. The idea of a factory/forge world is pretty radical and when I was flirting with writing a book I put one in as the endstate of a terraforming effort That said in all honesty I need to read more fiction about them.
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Jul 31, 2024 01:09
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There's definitely a lot of people living in the Sol system in 40k, but I always got the impression that Holy Terra itself was dedicated mostly to a bunch of giant temples rather than hosting all that many people living there. Feros in Mass Effect is an interesting one, it's a big planet city but the civilization that was there is gone and died out. There's just a lot of inscrutable ruins.
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Aug 9, 2024 19:19
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It's fascinating to consider just how many people could live on a literal city-planet. For thought experiment purposes, take the population density of New York City: 11,314/km2. Covering over the entire Earth's land, 148,940,000 km2, with equally-dense urbanization would yield a population of 1,685,107,160,000 -- over 1.6 trillion! And that's just the extant landmass, not even covering the entire surface as a classic ecumenopolis does. In that case, with the total planetary surface area of 510,072,000 km2, Earth City would have a population of 5,770,954,608,000. How'd you like to conduct that census. Of course, there are factors that can drive that number down. Even within a continuously artificial surface there would be variations in regional purpose that would thin the local numbers. Traditionally, food and other raw materials that require access to uncovered surface land are imported and/or recycled, so farming and mining are out. But by the same measure, an enormous processing and transit infrastructure would be necessary to bring all of that in from elsewhere, craft it into functional product and shuttle where it needs to go. And with no natural ecosystem remaining, atmospheric and waste processing would necessarily be a huge ongoing concern planetwide. Mmm, greywater. In order to keep the math simple (and because I'm not effortposting any harder for something I'm not getting paid for), let's say that between all the infrastructure needed to support the population, the automation an advanced society capable of building an ecumenopolis would logically have access to, and a generous comfort factor, we're dropping the average population density by a factor of... 40. There, now our New Earth City has a population of 144,273,865,200. Whew, only 144 billion and change! That's still an absolutely titanic population, but in population density terms, only about 282/km2 -- about the same as the current UK.
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Aug 11, 2024 20:38
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Has Star Wars ever mentioned how many people live in Coruscant? I know the planet city is so massive there's a city under the city.
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Aug 11, 2024 22:00
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There could also be giant sci-fi mechanisms taking up big chunks of space as well. There's one of the missions in the Old Republic is to do something to rescure some big inscrutable machines that are supposed to be critical to the functioning of the city and are thousands of years old, but nobody really knows exactly what they do. There's these massive shafts into the deeper undercity that spaceships have to go down, that takes up some space, presumably there's some massive hangars here and there. Cybertron in Transformers has even more seemingly inscrutable mechanisms, and the planet is alternately described as a giant city or a giant factory. Presumably most of the mechanisms are all broken as well. It seldom seems actually densely populated, even if there's definitely a lot of room for people to live, from the surface all the way down into the core. Transformers are also bigger than humans, but the planet overall seems smaller than Earth.
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Aug 11, 2024 22:29
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McSpanky posted:It's fascinating to consider just how many people could live on a literal city-planet. For thought experiment purposes, take the population density of New York City: 11,314/km2. Covering over the entire Earth's land, 148,940,000 km2, with equally-dense urbanization would yield a population of 1,685,107,160,000 -- over 1.6 trillion! And that's just the extant landmass, not even covering the entire surface as a classic ecumenopolis does. In that case, with the total planetary surface area of 510,072,000 km2, Earth City would have a population of 5,770,954,608,000. How'd you like to conduct that census. I have to check my notes but I'm pretty sure for my own settings I had it noted that the alien empire I had cooked up that they had three ecumenopoli style mega cities on their homeworld and then left the rest to noble estates, nature reserves and research use. I think I specifically had the 50/50 Earth conservation plan in mind with it. Although ultimately much of the landscape was environmentally engineered to help sustain the three mega regions. I should probably work on that again. 🙂
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Aug 12, 2024 00:01
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TuxedoOrca posted:Has Star Wars ever mentioned how many people live in Coruscant? I think their official thing is "nobody knows" precisely because of the undercity and difficulty conducting a census. And, nobody cares. Also poo poo was so hosed on Coruscant during the republic era that a senatorial aide was rationing water.
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Aug 12, 2024 14:39
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I think the old EU eventually settled on Coruscant’s official population being about 1 trillion registered citizens during the time of the Clone Wars, but probably triple that number of unregistered beings on the planet as well, and that’s just on the surface “upper” levels cause once you got deep enough down, nobody knew or cared enough to find out as Ravenfood mentioned.
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Aug 13, 2024 01:44
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The 1313 game was going to get into a lot of the weirder deep-Coruscant stuff, but then it was cancelled. At the end of the EU Coruscant had also gotten extra funky from the vongforming and demonic possession by an elder god, but that's been thrown out.
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Aug 13, 2024 05:06
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Coruscant isn't just an ecumenopolis, it's also effectively a shellworld because there are concentric layers of ecumenopolis on it. Holy Terra in 40k is its only real peer, since most other ecumenopoli are, yeah, kind of one and done.
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Aug 13, 2024 05:44
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Coruscant isn't just an ecumenopolis, it's also effectively a shellworld because there are concentric layers of ecumenopolis on it. I think shellworlds rock too.
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Aug 13, 2024 12:50
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SlothfulCobra posted:At the end of the EU Coruscant had also gotten extra funky from the vongforming and demonic possession by an elder god, but that's been thrown out. Speaking of, Matthew Stover's Traitor used the 1 Trillion number as a rough estimate of Coruscant's population, and I think that might have been it was the first time that was established. Wookieepedia cites a 2003 RPG article as the earliest source for that number, but Traitor was published in 2002. quote:For the sake of argument, suppose the conquest of Coruscant has caused casualties on an unimaginable scale. Suppose ten billion people died in the Yuuzhan Vong bombardment— Suppose twenty billion more were killed in the ground-quakes that accompanied the alteration of the planet’s orbit— Suppose another thirty billion have since starved to death, or been killed by Yuuzhan Vong search-and-destroy teams, or have been poisoned, or eaten, or otherwise died from contact with Vongformed life— Suppose an additional forty billion have been enslaved, or interred, or otherwise held captive by the Yuuzhan Vong. RoboChrist 9000 posted:Coruscant isn't just an ecumenopolis, it's also effectively a shellworld because there are concentric layers of ecumenopolis on it. It's been built up so much, that there's even a special tourist area where people can go and look at the peak of the highest mountain on the planet - which is the only place where the ground is actually still visible: 
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Aug 14, 2024 03:37
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I wonder if those buildings around it have museum exhibits about what Coruscant looked like before it was covered, or if anyone even remembers.
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Aug 14, 2024 05:50
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That's what fascinates me about Coruscant. Just layer upon layer of city built one over the other, with the possibility that it's existed for so long no one even remembers what the planet looked like.
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Aug 14, 2024 08:27
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Yeah. 40k has a very bizarre relationship with scale; sometimes things are too big without realizing what that implies, surprisingly often they are too small, but sometimes they do seem to realize juust how loving enormous the population and scale of a hive, let alone a hive world, is. Like realistically the average ecumenopolis - let alone one like Coruscant or Holy Terra - should have a population in excess of lots of other sci-fi nations. It's sort of the ringworld thing, only smaller; it's such a massive setting that once you have one you really never, ever, need to explore any other part of the setting because the population of multiple other settings can fit inside it. Administering Coruscant should be about as challenging a task as administering the entire rest of the galaxy, abouts.
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Aug 14, 2024 12:30
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Robot Style posted:Speaking of Coruscant (...) That's a pretty neat idea and a cool image. What movie/game/whatever is that image from?
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Aug 14, 2024 19:41
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Twenty Four posted:That's a pretty neat idea and a cool image. What movie/game/whatever is that image from? The image is from the latest season of Mandalorian, specifically the third episode which focuses on Dr. Pershing. They’re called the Manarai Mountains and they’re mentioned now and then in the old EU (I believe like the name Coruscant itself, they were created by Timothy Zahn for Heir to the Empire).
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Aug 15, 2024 12:08
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It's a pretty faithful replication of some art Ralph McQuarrie did for The Illustrated Star Wars Universe back in the 90's: In that book, the mountain peak was actually in a completely different location, with more of the planet's buildings cleared out around it to give it more reverence.  I do kind of like the new version though - clustering it in the middle of the city and surrounding it with tourist trap gift shops and restaurants feels a lot more realistic.
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Aug 15, 2024 21:19
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Robot Style posted:In that book, the mountain peak was actually in a completely different location, with more of the planet's buildings cleared out around it to give it more reverence. The latter one seems to be taking some vibes from Mecca and the Kaaba. Having the symbol of spirituality and old traditions in a plaza that is otherwise largely empty and enclosed by the glittering spires of wealth and modernity. I really dig it.
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Aug 18, 2024 03:17
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SlothfulCobra posted:There could also be giant sci-fi mechanisms taking up big chunks of space as well. There's one of the missions in the Old Republic is to do something to rescure some big inscrutable machines that are supposed to be critical to the functioning of the city and are thousands of years old, but nobody really knows exactly what they do. There's these massive shafts into the deeper undercity that spaceships have to go down, that takes up some space, presumably there's some massive hangars here and there. Yeah, Coruscant is a crazy example because it's been built up so much that, as other have noted, their equivalent of Mount Everest is now the only natural terrain still accessible from the "surface" and is a chintzy tourist attraction. It would surely take at least thousands of years of continual development to produce that result, which is plausible since the Star Wars galaxy has spacefaring civilizations that old. And I know the mission sequence you're talking about, it's a lot of fun because the robots that run the undercity maintenance grid are so old and alien that they communicate in terms of geometry and it takes a while to figure out just what the hell they're saying. RoboChrist 9000 posted:Administering Coruscant should be about as challenging a task as administering the entire rest of the galaxy, abouts. For real, the biggest job pool on the planet would be administration, at that scale most of the planet's internal resources would be dedicated to its own needs. Diagetically ecumenopoli would be administrative black holes, growing at a geometric rate to consume an unimaginable quantity of the resources of the empire containing them. This is one area where 40K's insane scale is probably right on the money, once you've got one everything else pretty much has to snowball right along with it just to keep up. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Aug 18, 2024 |
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Aug 18, 2024 19:57
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Yeah. I said it a few times in here but 40k is fascinating in how it both gets its scale and the ramifications of it way better than a lot of other more grounded sci-fi settings, but then at times also gets that scale completely wrong. But the Kafkaesque nightmare of the Administratum is pretty great and on the money, and likewise I think it's pretty correct in assuming that something decentralized and more or less neo-feudal is really the only possible way to 'govern' a polity as massive as the the Imperium. Or, yeah, the Galactic Republic. Which is also something Star Wars generally seems to get. Because the Galactic Republic - and Empire - really does seem to be, especially in the primary media, much more of a loose confederacy or something even like the Imperium. The core worlds might have more direct engagement with Coruscant and its edicts, but it definitely feels like farther you go from there, the looser that control becomes until eventually control is basically nominal and worlds are their own self-governing polities that, at best, pay taxes and/or nominal fealty to the Republic/Empire.
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Aug 19, 2024 06:02
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 The Bureau of Standards you see in Andor is a good example of what it takes to govern the day-to-day stuff in the Republic/Empire.
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Aug 19, 2024 07:53
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TuxedoOrca posted:
Honestly that was one of my favorite parts of the series.
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Aug 19, 2024 21:00
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How much of the Republic/Empire is Coruscant? Like, what proportion of the population/GDP is tied up in that single city-planet?
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Aug 19, 2024 23:51
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Information about Coruscant and the core worlds is pretty scant in the EU, even in sourcebooks. The fact that so much of Star Wars media takes place on sparsely populated backwaters out on the Outer Rim seems to imply that there's a lot of the galactic economy relies on lower-down resource extraction. There's some worlds that seem to mainly rely on agriculture like Dantooine and Lothal, and they do alright. Not making money hand over fist, but not total poverty. More in the focus of stories, there's a lot of treasure seekers and people with get-rich-quick schemes transporting around goods worth a fortune, which also makes it profitable for pirates and raider groups to operate in out of the way areas to steal. Coruscant isn't the only city world out there. Taris is one of the other big ones before it got bombed into oblivion by the Sith. There's a few massively industrial worlds like Corellia or Kuat, but sometimes they manage to shift a lot of the heavy industry into orbit. A whole host of planets are simply mentioned here and there but don't actually get featured prominently enough to get a real idea of them, like Fondor, Anaxes, Empress Teta, Skako, Metellos and Alsakan. Maybe some aren't that covered in cities and it's exaggerated. A lot of them also seem to have a lot more written about their place in the old-old republic long before the movies, so maybe between planet-destroying disasters and Coruscant dominance they may have fallen from prominence. And then there's some planets that manage to be wealthy but with a relatively small population so the wealth is pretty concentrated, and they don't even have to gently caress up the planet that much to do it, so they can feel so superior about living in unspoiled nature. Alderaan was supposed to be like that. Naboo is more directly onscreen and sells plasma from the planet's core and has some kind of bespoke artisan shipbuilding industry. Nal Hutta is a really interesting example because it's a wealthy world of unspoiled nature, but that nature is a gross swamp that the Hutts like because they're gross slugs. The Hutts can afford their fancy capital planet because most of the important business and industry is done at Nar Shaddaa, Nal Hutta's moon, which is entirely covered by city.
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Aug 20, 2024 04:59
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I always thought Terra was still mostly wasteland, but the Imperial palace was slowing crawling out futher and further. I know in the Seige of Terra books, you have characters that have been conscripted to defend the Imperial Palace being taken from cities/towns/settlements across the planet. Its interesting that the Imperial Palace is centered on the Himalayas. The Emperor had the peaks flattened to build the palace, and it just expanded from there.
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Aug 21, 2024 04:54
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habituallyred posted:Trantor and its fate is a stone cold classic. The Caves of Steel have a lot of the same energy even if they are a bit short of the full monty. Fun fact: In The Caves of Steel, the horrible overpopulation of Earth that had forced people to live in underground termite-cities, was... 8 billion.
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Aug 21, 2024 12:09
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I read ringworld last year and it was basically interesting to see how badly it aged because of the fact of the demographic transition and the incredible sexism in Niven's writing.
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Aug 21, 2024 14:18
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Groke posted:Fun fact: In The Caves of Steel, the horrible overpopulation of Earth that had forced people to live in underground termite-cities, was... 8 billion. Isaac Asimov posted:"I wrote a novel in 1953 which pictured a world in which everyone lived in underground cities, comfortably enclosed away from the open air. People would say, 'How could you imagine such a nightmarish situation?' And I would answer in astonishment, 'What nightmarish situation?'"
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Aug 21, 2024 17:16
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well-known scam star citizen has a city planet, but they kept downscaling it because of how lovely the performance is not to mention it doesn't make sense (everything got built in a span of decades)
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Aug 25, 2024 00:39
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halokiller posted:well-known scam star citizen has a city planet, but they kept downscaling it because of how lovely the performance is not to mention it doesn't make sense (everything got built in a span of decades) That got me wondering, given that your typical city planet easily has a population of trillion, where would you even find the people to inhabit that place? Even handwaving the construction process with magical nanites, just the sheer task of moving the population to a newly built city-planet would be gargantuan. It really, really doesn't make any sense.
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Aug 25, 2024 12:32
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It might make sense in something like 40k or Star Wars where the planet has been an ecumenopolis for longer than human civilization has existed IRL. Especially in Star Wars, if I'm not misremembering the dates. Although even then, given the aforementioned impossibilities of properly administering every part of such a planet - especially the 'undercity' and other impoverished area - one good famine or plague should see a massive portion of the planet die out and lead to a more reasonable population with vast swathes of the city being uninhabited. Like at the risk of stating the obvious - a population is only as large as it can be. If food supplies become too small to support a population, people starve and eventually things balance out. When you're talking about something the scale of an ecumenopolis, especially one on Coruscant's scale, then yeah, one missed food shipment should result in billions dying and entire regions of the planet being depopulated.
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Aug 25, 2024 13:09
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Like at the risk of stating the obvious - a population is only as large as it can be. If food supplies become too small to support a population, people starve and eventually things balance out. When you're talking about something the scale of an ecumenopolis, especially one on Coruscant's scale, then yeah, one missed food shipment should result in billions dying and entire regions of the planet being depopulated. I always prefer to look at things the other way around: Coruscant not only exists, but has done so uninterrupted for such a large swath of Galactic history nobody even remembers a time when it wasn't the beating heart of interstellar civilization. That says a lot about the scale, safety, stability and prosperity inherent to Star Wars society, the productivity and speed and scale of trade enabled by their technology. We then also understand just how ghastly economic inequality is in that society by looking at places like Tatooine in comparison. People like Luke Skywalker have to scratch out a living farming water out of the desert air for places like Coruscant to exist.
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Aug 27, 2024 21:43
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