Lit A Bright Center: The Official Core Worlds Discussion Thread (Aftermath & Shattered Empire Spoilers)

True, but one of the most important and heavily populated planets in the galaxy - Denon - has rarely been mentioned and never actually appeared, to my knowledge. Rendili and Loronar, both major corporations, have had their home systems mostly unmentioned. Some planets may have significant galactic importance, but not in the stories.

 

It definitely makes things a lot more interesting and it also makes a lot more sense that such rises and fall would occur over such a large span of time.

As I said earlier, as far as shipyards go, I would like to see Kuat maybe get featured just a tad more in the earlier Old Republic stories.

 

Very true. And I get that alot of worlds have simply not been tapped for stories before. But I still think that in a region as old and populated as the Core, especially those worlds in or near the Arrowhead region, that there are bound to be many worlds that once had glory and in the modern era lack it entirely. Worlds that are just historical footnotes and worlds that are archaic in nature cause they never moved on while the rest of the galaxy did.

Afterall, if this thread has any "mission", it is to prove that the Core is far more diverse and varied than it has been portrayed in most sources.

--Adm. Nick

 

That is just your goal my friend!

--Nick

 

There is no doubt the Core Worlds are grand indeed.

Has there ever been any indication of how many planets within the Core are settled? As in of the 69 million plus Imperial systems, how many would be in the Core? I know the Core wins in terms of population, but I guess they would be in the majority in terms of planets settled as well.

 

Not necessarily as they should have about the same number of habitable worlds then other parts of the galaxy, though of course they are far more likely to really have a settlement on just about any rock that is worth settling.

 

The Core was much smaller in occupied space, but far denser than other galactic regions, so I assume it had so many inhabitable planets like the other regions. From the 1,7 full member worlds, maybe 500k to 700k (my guess), from the 69 million, about a quarter? The galaxy has three billion habitable worlds, one billion actually inhabited, 500 million in the known galaxy. Those 400 billion stars at all would be roughly 300 billion systems, so one habitable planet per 100 systems, a bit unrealistic, maybe. Galactic population is 100 quadrillion, ~100 million per planet, most systems only contain one inhabited world. In real life, Milky Way has about 100 million inhabited planets in 40 million systems.

 

Source?

 

I've learned it on the Intergalactic Imperial Academy on Kyuwon in the Orion Spiral Arm during theoretical lessons (I work as starfighter pilot).

 

Yeah that was sort of my thought process. I figured that for the sake of being located in the Core and for being the area of space that has been longest inhabited by humans it might have a disproportionate amount of settled worlds compared to the rimward areas of the galaxy.

 

The Core probably has a good chunk of those settled worlds, but I also imagine that the Core has alot of worlds that were stripped barren for resources during the early pre-Republic and Republic years. Before the Core worlds were able to expand into other regions, they most likely gobbled up whatever resources their own native star systems and neighboring system had.

--Adm. Nick

 

What about uninhabitable planets? If three billion planets are habitable, the galaxy still has several hundred billion ones unable to substain life naturally/after terraforming (coruscantforming?), but they still can be mined/stripped for ressources.

 

I have some calculations that can be found in this thread regarding the size, population, and number of planets in the Core that may help outline this discussion.

Short version: the area known as the 'Core' occupies about 3.4% of the settled galaxy and 2.1% of the galaxy as a whole (that's the entire settled core though, including the Negs and the southwestern Core, not just the Slice sections). If you spread 1 billion inhabited worlds evenly by space the Core would have 23 million planets. That's a functional minimum number. Personally I consider doubling it outright, making the habitation level of the Core twice that of the galactic average, at least a viable option. Doing it that way, it's pretty much inescapable that the Core actually contains a majority of the 69 million imperial worlds (and the Colonies probably contain most of the rest).

 

Good points. However, if early galactic history mirrors our own world history, care for a planets natural resources might not of mattered much, especially for the very reason that there are hundreds of billions of planets. For the early Core Worlders, if you had a neighboring system with plentiful natural resources that also had a habitable atmosphere, why not strip mine the hell out of it over another barren world? Afterall, it would be cheaper to do this on a world that is terrestrial and in the view of the early Repubic's peoples the galaxy is a big place with plenty of more worlds to be found.

--Adm. Nick

 

What’s interesting here is that strip mining and atmosphere taping of habitable worlds is at least frowned upon if not even illegal under the Republic.

 

The numbers in the core also get thrown off by the numerous systems with multiple inhabited worlds and moons. Corellia is odd for having 5 naturally habitable worlds, but many other Core systems seem to have a high number of primary inhabited worlds along with secondary worlds and inhabited moons and asteroids.

 

Actually it is cheaper to keep your strip mining off planets whatsoever. If you are conducting exactrive operations on a celestial body, the largest limitation on your return is the energy required to haul your stuff out of the gravity well at the end. As a result, smaller worlds make much more sense in this regard (in Star Wars repulsor technology mitigates this to at least some degree, but not entirely). They also have huge advantages regarding mineral accessibility due to the surface area to volume ratio - meaning the smaller the object the less drilling you have to do. So the real question is actually why is anyone bothering to mine (for export, local use has different limitations) on planetary bodies at all.

The short answer is that your resource has to be produced through conditions that are unique to that planetary scale. While this is certainly possible for gas giants (we can insert certain pressure and gravity requirements behind the production of Tibanna gas and related substances) it is difficult to develop a series on conditions on anything Earth-like that would not otherwise be found at more accessible points in the a given star system. Except of course, for the products of organic chemistry. That's ironic I suppose, strip mining planets in the Star Wars galaxy for long-chain hydrocarbons...how far we haven't come...

 

Don't most Star Wars systems only have on inhabited world? It seems so to me. Sol System has only one inhabited planet currently, but with terra-forming you could get.. say five? Earth, Mars, Venus, Jovian moons (Europa, Ganymede) Saturn moons (Titan) and other in artificial environments (Luna), but if it would work depends heavily on gravity.

Compare to the Firefly 'verse, one large system containing 5 stars, several protostars and 215 inhabited planets and moons.

 

The answer is: we have no idea.

Very few Star Wars systems are described with a full run-down of major orbiting objects. To my knowledge this was really only ever done for the small number of systems that were featured in the WotC source books of the d20 system period: Core and the Core Worlds and Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds in particular.

My incredibly speculative hypothesis would be that the controlling factor is hyperspace access. Since shipping costs depend heavily on the reliability of hyperspace access to a system, it makes the most sense to conduct your major mining operations in the outer reaches of systems that already have good access, which means having habitable planets one wishes to visit. Most of these operations are likely to be artificial environments, not habitable in any real way, but they would certainly qualify as 'inhabited' from an economic or military standpoint.

 

Or this and that kind of exotic crystal/gas/metal that will existent on a few worlds in the whole galaxy, which just often happen to be the materials that important GFFA tech is based around.

 

I don't think we should assume the Core is as full of inhabitable planets as the Rim. While science doesn't exactly take center stage in Star Wars, in the real world, the area around the core of a galaxy is inhospitable to life. While this obviously isn't the case in the GFFA, I would think we would at least see *fewer* habitable worlds per star there than in the Rim.

 

Well the Deep Core is little more than collapsing stars and semi crushed asteroids, the Core Worlds themselves are apparently just beyond that fate, though give it a few million years and they should also get around to start falling into the Black Hole in the centre, whilst what are now the Colonies would take their place.

 

Why should they fall into the Black Hole? In Milky Way, Sagitarius A hasn't consumed any stellar matter since several billion years.
Black Hole gravity vs. centrifugal forces caused by rotating around it = stable position.