Defiance (which I'm pretty sure is what the first two plants are, as the Defiance package has been opened and I didn't order it until mid-September) and Better Bush are both determinates that get about 3 feet tall, Celebrity is classified as a semideterminate, it can get 6-8 feet tall but I've grown it several times in the garden and it seldom gets above the top of my 5 foot tall cages. My setup should handle plants up to about 4 feet tall, I've got a metal rod in each grow bucket and will use garden clips to hold the plants upright. The timer that controls the drip irrigation pump also has a reciprocating fan plugged into it, so that should help with pollination.

The hydroponics professor at Nebraska-Lincoln has grown tomato plants that reach about 30 feet long, 10 feet vertically and 20 feet along the floor, with stems about as thick as a broomstick. He gets about a year's worth of yield from them, pruning off the older branches after they've stopped flowering. He uses a variety developed for hydroponic gardening, he told me the seeds cost $1 each from Johnny's.

The annual open house for the fall hydroponics class is coming up the week before Thanksgiving, I'll see if I can get some photos to post. In the past he's had students that did both Kratky and Nutrient Film systems, though gravel feed ones seem more popular. (The students do them with PVC rain gutters.)

It may be that he starts a new round of tomatoes because this is a teaching lab, not a hydroponics farm.