D-003: …Arachnea?

The planet Arachnea is an A-Class colony in Octant 8.  

Oceans cover 60-odd percent of its surface, and it’s a cold place, with most areas sub-zero most of the time.  The planet is tidally locked to its moon – they present the same face to each other all the time.  Unlike a more typical planet with a rotation about its axis, the tidal locking makes Arachnea’s warmest, and therefore most habitable areas, a strange squiggly line slashed roughly diagonally across one side of the planet’s surface and back up the other.  

Arachnea has some oxygen in its thin atmosphere, but not enough to breathe comfortably, so people on the surface away from settled areas need to wear respirators.  Along with the oxygen comes a biosphere that supports plant and animal life – much of the local wild life seems to be analogous to companion animals from the taxonomic class Arachnida.  The local wildlife generally skitters, and on numerous legs.

Local gravity is close enough to 1G that buildings do not use Grav plates, unlike many other worlds.  

Despite the cold and lack of breathable atmosphere Arachnea is a paradise compared to many worlds in the Dominion, and Eliana can stand on its surface at a Spidon ranch near the coast with nothing more than cold weather clothes and a respirator to compress oxygen from the air with effectively unlimited endurance.