8-289: Merchant Freighter Spanial – Control

This is an Ammonia world.  They’re relatively rare, and tend to be found only around dim red stars as brighter stars tend to throw off too much UV light and break down the ammonia in the atmosphere.  Otherwise, they’re occasionally found as moons of gas giants far from the star.  The brown-orange colour of the planet is due to the ammonia clouds in the atmosphere.  There’s probably a healthy dose of methane there too, with seas of ammonia and possibly even some water below, and any oxygen will be bound up with hydrogen as liquid water. 

The ammonia in the atmosphere of these worlds tends to leech a lot of metals from the crust and can form complex chemical compounds that tend to form layers in both atmosphere and sea, as a result, such worlds can be very electrically active as electric potentials form between layers and then discharge.