Blaine’s World
Let’s talk about this odd planet in the northwest corner of the Penfold Sector.
Blaine’s World is earth sized and has a water coverage of 50%. It is chiefly characterized by a breathable atmosphere, but one classified by InfoGalactic as “corrosive” due to the frequent acidic rain-fronts that plague the place. Humanity, ever resourceful, has found two ways to compensate. Most of the population lives in great cities clustered within cliff-side overhangs in the tropics. Te massive limestone cliffs both shed water away from the scattered cities, and help neutralize the worst of the frequent rains. They normally occur in pairs, one on each side of the huge canyons carved into the planet’s crust through millennia of storms.
Fewer in number, but pugnaciously independent of the temperate dwellers, hardier souls live in the perennially frozen north where it never quite gets warm enough to rain. Thankfully, a tech level of 9 means fusion power to keep them warm.
The local plant-life has evolved to survive in these conditions, perhaps due to waxy skin that sheds water, and that provides the raw materials for protective gear utilized by the locals as they harvest plant-life and hunt the big lizards that haunt the jungled uplands of the world. These provide the big off-world exports, and require considerable expertise to extract safely, which makes the cliffsiders as proud as their polar kin.
The polarmen mine the carbon-rich ice for sale to starships. As the system lacks a gas giant, the thick polar caps represent the only source of fuel within a parsec. It is they who keep the place connected to the wider galaxy, and they are as proud a people as any miners anywhere.
Now we’ve got two different polities for our balkanized planet, and even more excuse to station the ADC here. They act as a buffer between the crowded clifftownies and the hard-nosed icebumpkins, who are locked into a cold war over who should set export duty rates and who should represent Blaine’s World when governance issues come up on Janov36. The mercenary corporation’s duties include monitoring the situation and showing enough force to keep both sides limited to plausibly deniable violent activity and not a full-blown shooting match.