i was thinking about a setup which combined the hydro and stadium style setup which intrigued me. would be much cheaper but still a vert system.. ill explain it with words now but ill make a diagram for you guys later..
basically its like this..
you have a stadium style setup, but instead of benches with soil, you have 6 inch pvc pipes staggered in different levels.
you could either run 3 different pipes, on different resivours, or you could have one large res and have the pipe snake down from the top to the bottom and drain back into the res.
basically construct the pvc pipe with holes in it for netted cups similar to how they do the octogarden, but simply have 3,4,5 rows in a stadium style setup.. just drill the holes, drop the net cups in and flood..
the beauty is that you could configure it so many different ways, you could do a constant run like a nft system, or if you wanted you could run it like a flood and drain, or if you wanted to get technical you could make it an aeroponic setup..
you could either have them all on the same cycle, or have em staggered or whatever you wanted to do.. but either way it would be the benefits of a stadium style grow, with the convienience and ease of hydropoincs, and you could build the whole thing for probably 300 bux..
another thing you could do is a modified stadium with pvc pipes, but instead of having them offset and staggered like an upside down pyramid, just do them right on top of one another like 2 feet apart.. same concept but directly stacked instead of staggered back.
either way would be cool. i have always liked the ease of a stadium, but hate growing in soil no offense lol im just not too good at it.. anyways ill make some diagrams when i get back from the store today
just my .02
EDIT: If I am hijacking lemme know Richard Pryor and ill move it but i wanted to clarify and deliver those diagrams i promised.
as you can see you could add or remove a level depending on strain/height and if you did a lolipop style straight from clone this would be perfect especially if you offset the sites like seen in the fist diagram because basically the plants would not block eachother and you could have 4 tiers instead of 2 or 3..
now of course you will want to measure and make it straight an pretty when you construct it but i did this in paint and im lazy LOL