Post by Jëdî T¥ on Mar 10, 2007 10:21:21 GMT -5
Coruscant
starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Coruscant
"An incandescent organ of life, visibly vibrating with the pulses of billions. " That's legendary Chancellor Signet Mezzileen speaking of Coruscant, the planet he ruled for over seventy years and praised as "the galaxy's biggest little neighborhood." Contrast that with poet Adder Ain-la's famous denunciation of the Republic capital: "A dead metal shell of a world, Coruscant is soulless beyond slavation, so cold and empty its frozen carcass must be reheated with solar mirrors."
Neither commentary is right or wrong.
Coruscant is the type of world that can be both spectacular and frightening, where indigents are sheltered in the shadow of restuarants selling food at ten thousand credits per plate. One thing it will never be is predictible--- or dull.
From space, " the jewel of the Core Worlds" can almost be mistaken for an artifical construct. Where other worlds have forests, grasslands, and oceans, Coruscant has factories, skyscrapers, and aquifers. Every scrap of surface area, except for the tiny polar ice caps, has been smothered bya dense layer of urbanization. In many places, this layer is covered by another layer, then another and another, creating canyons that plunge vertically for kilometers. Even the Manarai mountain range, surely the planet's most distinctive feature in eons past, is now a mere swelling in the omnipresent cityscape, dusted in snow.
Momument Plaza is a bowl-shaped arena build around one of the lesser Manarai mountaintops, the place where the bare rock of the summit projects up through the center of the arena floor is one of the planet's most popular tourist attractions.
Orbital traffic encloses the planet like electrons around a nucleus, delivering food and supplies, ambassadors and tourists. Magnetic guidance lines ogranize atmosphere traffic into rows on a rigid grid. Landing platforms hovering among the traffic lanes accomodate the few private starships that are permitted to break orbit. Airbuses and air taxis ferry Coruscant's citizens, while cargo transfer passes through frieght tunnels underground. Pipelines suck water from the polar ice caps and store it in reservoirs, which sometimes do double duty as aesthetic attractions for the locals---as in the so called "Western Sea."
Many expanses of Coruscant, particularly those in the western hempisphere, are churning industrial powerhouses sparsely populated but constantly generating energy and furnished goods. Most of the planet's population is concentrated around the equator and in what will one day be known as Imperial City, right now it is Republic City--- a metropolis the size of a continent and distinguished from the surrounding conurbation by its sheer height. The lowest levels of the City have not seen daylight in tens of thousands of years. Descending to ground level is like climbing into the depths of a murk-cave on APEI-- and nearly as dangerous. Haywire droids, carnivorous funi, and mutated troglodytes run rampant in this terrifying shadow world.
But it's possible, and even expected, for Coruscant to live their entire lives kilometers removed fromt he unpleasantness of the depths. Everything they need is a short walk or a flitter ride away, and the politicians for whom Crouscant is a second home have made sure the planet is never lacking in luxury.