Sicca

Sicca is the fourth planet from Amplus Nova and is the largest center of industrial manufacturing in the entire Venezian Empire; Sicca is converted almost entirely into a forge world that produces millions of tons of manufactured goods a day, from weapons, to consumer goods such as personal devices and furniture, to being the center of Venezia’s great starship building enterprises. Sicca’s extreme industrial strength lends it the title of Venezia’s iron heart, and as its iron heart, the Venezian Empire establishes a very large military presence on the planet itself. Sicca takes about 732 standard days to orbit around Amplus Nova.

Sicca had used to be a barren and inhospital planet before the colonization process had begun; although as both manned and unmanned surveys and explorations of Sicca began to unearth various and rather interesting tidbits about the planet, it turned out that Sicca had been saturated by impacts from asteroids from the inner and outer parts of the Amplus Nova system. Notably, while craters were visible from telescopic observations of the planet, it very quickly became apparent that there was far more extraterrestrial residue underneath the surface, indicating the presence of minerals deep within the crust that were brought from multiple heavy asteroid bombardments throughout Sicca’s celestial history. Specifically, far more than just passive observation of Sicca’s surface would have anyone realize. The presence of these asteroid impacts led Sicca to have an absolute overabundance of raw ores and rare elements that, although rare on Venezia Prime due to overconsumption of resources throughout the ages, was rather common and easily found within the crust of the planet.

Sicca was eventually converted into an industrial forge world, after a massive project between the varying local governments, corporations, and the national government itself relocated many factories and mining operations to Sicca for both mining raw materials and refining those materials into alloys and electronics needed for the Venezian populace. Through the assistance of terraforming technologies pioneered through environmental science decades before, this process was exceedingly successful, and Sicca was rendered hospitable for human habitation and allowing the newly constructed mining and industrial industries to be worked in; Sicca had sprouted surprisingly quickly in comparison with other planets, with Sicca being a fully fledged and functional colony in a matter of decades.

Sicca is unlike the other inhabited worlds in that it does not have an actual environment; indeed, Sicca’s status as a barren world means that natural life had been nonexistent on the planet, and while it was rendered habitable for venezians, it had not been an astonishingly beautiful or even healthy world. Its current status as an industrial world leads it to naturally have a runaway pollution effect that has left its air smoggy, polluted, and toxic to breathe, and eventually undid its original terraforming to a degree that protective masks (and protective suits in some cases) became mandatory for workers, civilians, and military personnel to wear at all times. Sicca’s pollution effect has also snowballed into a greenhouse effect as well, and despite being farther from the sun than Venezia Prime is, is generally hotter than Venezia Prime and has a similar climate to a desert.

Sicca is also notably the only planet that cannot sustain itself by itself. Food grown in Sicca, due to the environment, either fails to grow or ends up poisonous and unfit to eat. Sicca produces artificial foods for its populace on the regular, though is incapable of providing nearly enough for all of its citizens to eat. Most notably, Sicca relies most on Venezia Prime and Lympha for its production and agricultural needs, with food imports being the most common and largest portion of its imports from both planets, and a big part of its importance from Lympha being the imports of high quality lumber in the creation of its more decorative civilian goods within its factories.

The immense and myriad collection of factories on the surface of Sicca produce quite literally anything the Venezian government requires, and Sicca’s surface has been divided into “sectors” that specialize into the production of a specific sector of economy or military. Some parts of Sicca specialize entirely in the creation of consumer goods, and other sectors specialize in the creation of electronics and robotics that are used in both civilian and military capacities. Sicca is also the center of construction for the Venezian Empire’s starship fleets, with orbital drydocks stationed around Sicca that take mass produced components from the surface to be assembled en masse in space by a fleet of manned and unmanned construction workers who work on mass-producing the navy’s warships.

The end result of these however, does not increase the quality of life on the surface below. Sicca is a hardly pleasant area to live in, and the workers that live in Sicca are either indentured servants to the government or the corporations, or work there in hopes of being able to get a fortune large enough to move to Lympha or Venezia Prime and live comfortably. Most of the populace of Sicca are either poor, prisoners of war, or criminals in hiding. As Sicca produces almost all pieces of equipment in the Venezian Empire’s military, the result is the planet being heavily fortified and defended by a number of forts; Sicca has a variety of fleets and armies stationed on the planet in case of attack by foreign or domestic powers. The Military Police division has the highest presence in Sicca, and is constantly battling against crime syndicates that have formed in the inner recesses of Sicca’s great industrial megalopolises. Military bases, such as Fort Omicron, have popped up across Sicca to both bolster Military Police presence as well as help keep the planet safe; however, soldiers refer to being stationed in Sicca as a “death sentence”.