Saga A curious question

I was having a Star Wars marathon this past Thanksgiving & a question kept coming up.

Watching the scenes of Cloud City & some of the scenes of Coruscant a question arose: what is the altitude of some of the scenes in Cloud City & Coruscant?

I get the impression that they are thousands of feet up. Maybe as much as 10,000+. At curtains altitudes it gets extremely cold. Like, below zero. &/or the air is way too thin. So thin you can pass out from oxygen starvation.
So how was this problem solved? I did read something about some planets with the tech able to manipulate weather. Could they manipulate this as well?

 

On Coruscant, perhaps the huge amount of machinery and infrastructure down below creates a buffer of warm air in the upper levels. The EU also had Coruscant as far from its sun, and so orbital mirrors were used to warm the planet. This might also be a potential solution. Of course, in both of these scenarios, the lower levels of the city would be very warm. Alternatively, perhaps there is climate control - either on a large scale or on an individual-building or -zone scale - throughout the entire city's construction.

Bespin is a gas giant, so depending on its diameter and atmospheric composition, Cloud City could be thousands of miles from "the surface," which would probably be less a rocky ground than a sea of liquid hydrogen or the like (as we think is the case with Jupiter). With the right atmosphere and distance from the core, the air might be breathable and the gravity might be comfortable. Of course, this is SW, where force fields and gravity control exist. Those might be used as well.

 

really?

**goes and check atlas*

Wow, sixth planet from the sun.

 

My big question has always been: Where does Coruscant get its oxygen from? I'm no scientist, and if I'm remembering my high school science correctly, oxygen is a waste product of plants and algae, which Coruscant does not have...well, in quantities large enough to create enough oxygen for the billions of species living on that planet would need. I'm sure there's a way you can create oxygen from water, but taking into account the amount of water that Coruscant would need to import just for drinking purposes is almost too much to imagine, let along importing for both purposes. I like big cities and would love to visit a place like Coruscant, it would be great if I had the money to purchase an apartment on top of one of the tallest buildings, (can you imagine the views?) but I don't see how a place like Coruscant can sustainable.

 

Use electrolysis (powered by fusion, solar, or some other unknown source) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use the hydrogen for fuel or something, use the oxygen for air purification. Or you could just use the solar or fusion to run air purifiers. You'd be duplicating ecosystem services with machinery, which would probably never be as efficient or as integrated into nature, but it might be effective for the purposes of human inhabitants.

 

Coruscant's oxygen is produced artifically in the lower levels.

According to Star Wars canon, it is the sixth planet from it's relatively small sun which makes it to cold to naturally support Human life, so orbital mirrors are used to warm it up. There is also still ice in the polar caps. Realistically and logically, the heat extense of all energy consumers like light panels, speeders, hologram TVs, starships etc. would create so much heat the skyscrapes would melt away.

Besides, it is the Human homeworld, so being naturally to cold for Humans makes no sense.

According to the Essential Atlas, most other planets and moons in the system are uninhabited and don't support life, only one planet (Vandar-3) and two of Coruscant's moons (a forest moon like Endor and those where Palpatine cloned a second army) are inhabited. Coruscant became a city planet 90,000 BBY prior to the invention of the modern hyperdrive, so foodstuffs, medicine and other ressources could have been created inside the system only, on other planets besides Coruscant itself.

A way to retcon most of this: In prehistoric days, Coruscant was warm enough to let Humans evolve and other planets have been inhabitable back then and were used for foodproduction and other ressources. But a cataclysm changed the clima and made it colder during a time when Humans already had developed space travel and were able to build those orbital mirrors. The heat extense of machines made it to hot later, but a way has been found to cool it down, again. Now the mirrors are used to control clima and weather. The other worlds in the system become non-inhabitable after a military attack or something similiar.

To answer your question: Cloud City floats several thousand miles above the surface of Bespin's terrestrial/coruscantial core. The celebration on Imperial Center shown in Return of the Jedi was happening about a kilometer above the top of the city crust, because you can see the Jedi temple in the background and it's about one kilometer high.

 

Well, I try not to read too much into things like this when it comes to the SW films - remember, they take place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away", and because of this, IMHO the normal scientific rules that hold true in our universe are not necessarily the same in the SW universe.

Perfect example: I'm fairly certain that there is no sound in space (think of the scenes in "2001: A Space Odyssey"), so already the sounds of laser guns & the sounds of ships/Death stars being destroyed (in any of the numerous SW space battles) are "wrong".....