This is a discussion of the features of planets of the galaxy; galactic geography is a separate topic.
Most beings prefer to live on planets. Even with grav plates to avoid the stomach-churning of free fall and particle screens to keep out radiation, only hardened spacers would rather be in a fragile space habitat instead of on a nice stable world. Repulsorlift technology and geometry buffers make it easy to take part in a galactic economy without paying a ruinous energy cost for shipping up a gravity well, and planetary ecologies are huge and robust compared to the fine-tuned ones in habitats. Almost all galactic culture exists within a few dozen light-minutes of stars; the vast distances in between are spanned by hyperdrive and largely ignored.
Hypervelocity stars seldom have their own solar systems, but do present navigational hazards to hyperspace routes.
Useful rules of thumb when talking about sizes: one solar mass is about 1000 Jupiter masses is about 300,000 Earth masses.
Most planets whose atmosphere does not include sufficient ionization to block radio signals have a constellation of microsats in low orbit providing GPS and communications uplink services.
Most planets are in orbit around stars of various stellar classification, though some orbit gas giants that in turn orbit a star. The evolution of the star matters a great deal for the availability of interesting planets. The quality of the light affects the photosynthetic pigments that will thrive on the planets. About half of all stars have at least one planet.
A brown dwarf is big enough that the energy from all of its matter accreting is enough to heat it up so that it sheds light, but not big enough to start up nuclear fusion. These have a ruddy light, or may only radiate in the infrared; planets orbiting them can be warmed enough to be habitable, but life on them has to take a different turn. Planets orbiting brown dwarfs that are particularly well situated on a shipping lane may be terraformed by adding orbital lighting stations to make up for the deficiency of full-spectrum sunlight. This can lead to interesting situations where a city is under an orbiting spotlight, but the lands around it are always dim or dark.
Red dwarfs are one of the most common stars in the galaxy, ranging from 85 Jupiters to half the mass of our Sun. Despite their name, they still give off light that a human would regard as white, but (once mature) very little in the way of ultraviolet; one might find a resort planet circling one, but wouldn’t get a tan there. (They’re roughly the color of a bright incandescent bulb, like a projector lamp; the skies on their worlds are usually dark indigo.) They burn steadily for a very long time. Beings that evolve under red dwarf stars usually need some form of protection from ultraviolet light when visiting planets circling brighter suns, and the plants often have very dark foliage to absorb all the available light.
Young red dwarfs emit strong ultraviolet flares, and planets in their habitable zone usually only support underwater life (about 9 meters down), though this doesn’t stop some organizations from setting up mining colonies.
Orange dwarf stars, ranging from 0.5 to 0.8 solar masses, are long-lived and stable. They have an expected lifespan of 15 to 30 billion years, so only the very oldest are even beginning to turn into red giants now. Planets around such suns usually have sea-blue atmospheres.
Yellow dwarf
stars, from 0.8 to 1.0 solar masses, are particularly well suited to
humanoid life. (Our own Sun is a G2V yellow
dwarf.) They have billions of years of useful lifespan before
evolving into red giants, and a comfortable habitable zone.
They pump out unhealthy amounts of ultraviolet light, but oxygen
atmospheres will form a layer of protective ozone that renders
planetary surfaces habitable. The skies on planets around yellow and
brighter stars are usually the classic sky blue
(though that
can be changed by all manner of gases and particulates; H2S
can turn the sky green). Plants usually make use of red or green
chlorophyll for photosynthesis.
A yellow-white subgiant runs from 1.0 to 1.4 solar masses, and much brighter— at 1.35 solar masses, a yellow-white subgiant is 4 times as bright as the Sun. The blue light there is sufficiently intense that the plants are either violet (due to reflecting excess blue light that they don’t need) or yellowish-orange (caused by optimizing for blue light and discarding the entire range of red to green).
White subgiant stars range from 1.4 to 2.1 solar masses, and tens of times as bright as the Sun.
Blue-white subgiants range from 2 to 16 solar masses and are thousands of times as bright as the Sun. Blue-white and blue stars... Even in the ranges where a habitable planet might exist, the levels of radiation... (World-Building p44–5)
A star that is more than 16 solar masses and still on the main sequence is a blue subgiant. These are very bright (over a million times as bright as the Sun) and not very long-lived; they disperse any planetary ingredients in the vicinity, so any planet orbiting one is a stray... or was put there.
An aging orange, yellow, or yellow-white sun will grow into a red giant when it starts running out of hydrogen to fuse. This will pretty much wreck the inner system, but may render habitable planets that were once iceballs; these planets will usually require terraforming, as the red giant phase doesn’t last long and doesn’t give a planet much chance to develop. Even so, millions of years are plenty long to recoup investments, so explorers discovering freshly-thawed planets will usually drop a package of basic unicellular life to get the party started and then find a good auction house for the coordinates.
As stars get larger than a yellow dwarf, their lifespan decreases quickly: at 1.5 solar masses, a star lives only 3 billion years (compared to our Sun’s 10 billion), and at 3, it only has 370 million years. Life seems to have been seeded in the galaxy on the order of a billion years ago, so younger stars have simply missed out on it. Stars up to 6 solar masses will still become red giants; beyond that, things get more interesting, though not very friendly to life.
A white dwarf is the cooling embers of a red giant; they have run out of fuel to burn, but are still white-hot and will take a long time to cool. They usually run from 0.5 to 0.7 solar masses. Their star systems are usually wrecked by the star’s previous boisterous phase, and are seldom habitable. However, the red giant might have burnt off volatile layers from planets and exposed rocky cores full of valuable materials for mining— in vacuum.
A fresh white dwarf is usually shrouded in a planetary nebula left by the star’s red giant phase. Fresh ones are still quite hot and fill their habitable zones with ultraviolet and X-ray radiation; older ones that have cooled down are safer for ordinary life.
While white dwarfs on their own are fairly staid, they can get into trouble if a neighbor comes to play. If one can start stealing mass from a larger neighbor, it can build up enough to generate a supernova.
Supergiant stars are of at least ten solar masses. Blue supergiants burn hot and quick, only lasting 10–50 million years, and eventually explode in a core-collapse supernova. They seldom form planets, and they are very hostile to most life— they generate huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, and starships need lots of shielding to cope with the environment. Occasionally, a supergiant will be sufficiently well-placed on hyperspace routes to make it worthwhile to build a space station there.
Supernovae leave a present behind: at less than 20 solar masses, it’s a neutron star; any bigger than that, and you get a black hole.
Most stars are in a binary pair; their separation will have different effects on planetary formation. A close binary, like Tatooine’s suns, will simply act like a single star to everything outside a certain distance. Greater separation, like in Alpha Centauri, may permit the formation of habitable planets but inhibit gas giants.
Some planets exist outside the habitable zone of a star, but are still able to support life due to tidal heating (though the ecology is going to depend less on sunlight); some such planets may be entirely sunless. Such orphaned planets, if any were to be discovered, could make an excellent hidden base for pirates or other covert activities. Even if it doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere, having readily available liquid water comes in handy, and the heat emissions from habitation are more easily camouflaged.
A crucial point for planetary formation is the system’s ice line: the distance from the star where water can stay frozen. Inside the ice line, only rocky planets can form; gas giants can only accrete out in the colder parts of the system. (World-Building p44–5) Planetary formation takes quite some time: Young star systems start building gas giants about two million years into their star’s life, and terrestrial planets form around 10Myr, though they can be shuffled around the system for the next billion years afterward.
Most habitable
planets have relatively strong gravity, comparable to the
Coruscant standard g. Planets that are too small or too
low-density have their core cool off too quickly, and without the
combination of the heat of planetary formation and the decay of
radioactive minerals in the planet’s core, tectonic
activity shuts down and continents sink.
Without subduction, the carbonate-silicate
cycle that helps to maintain a breathable atmosphere shuts down;
all the carbon that plants need to pull out of the atmosphere
accumulates at the bottom of the oceans, the plants stop producing
oxygen, and the atmosphere rapidly becomes unbreathable. In addition,
mountains wear down over millions of years, and the planet is soon a
cue ball
. (World-Building
p51,68)
Habitable
moons drive their tectonic forces through tidal
heating, and can be much lighter; there, the limit is holding onto
its atmosphere and its water. If a planet’s upper atmosphere
doesn’t freeze out water vapor with a cold trap
before the protective ozone layer runs out, ultraviolet light can
break up the water— and the hydrogen is then light enough to go
free into the cosmos. (This the current thinking on where
Venus’ oceans went.) (World-Building
p117, 71) While gas giants do radiate more heat than they receive from
their primary, this still isn’t a great deal; most of the extra
energy comes from tidal heating. This is still only a few tens of
degrees, so the gas giant can’t be that far outside the
star’s life zone.
Large, low-density planets can make fine farming worlds; a planet
with the density of Luna and a diameter of 20,000km instead of
13,000km would have the same gravity as Earth and 10 times its surface
area. Low density, however, implies the planet is metal-poor (and
probably formed in a metal-poor system, though it might be the result
of a giant
impact knocking light materials off a planet), so metal tools
would need to be imported from offworld or outside the system, or
extracted at far greater expense than on a metal-rich world. Due to
lack of radioactives in their core, they are usually found orbiting
gas giants, though occasional ones have sufficient potassium-40
decaying in their cores to keep tectonic activity going. Large, rocky
worlds (super-Earths
) with diameters of 25,000km have
four times the mass of Earth but only twice the surface gravity, and
can
host life even close when tidally locked to their primary.
High-density planets have higher metal abundance (and may even be more efficient to mine than asteroids), but this may be so high that heavy metal poisoning would impair most species that might try to live there. Some such planets may host life that uses arsenic where most life uses phosphorus; beings with such different biochemistry would find each other mutually poisonous.
Day length is also fairly reasonable; a planet whose day is too short will exhibit a very strong coriolis effect driving hurricanes, and will tend toward extreme weather. (World-Building p82) A planet whose day is too long have very hot days, very cold nights, and violent weather caused by the convection between these extreme temperatures. (World-Building p88) It’s very difficult to raise crops under such conditions, so it is rare to find anything other than trading or mining outposts on such planets.
Year length, similarly, is limited by the size of the habitable zone around the star. Planets whose year lasts several standard years have to adapt to long, dry summers and long, cold winters; sentient beings usually build massive cisterns and granaries as stockpiles.
Planets that are too close to their primaries usually lose their moons to tidal braking. (World-Building p28)
A large moon is helpful in stabilizing a planet’s axial tilt. (World-Building p22,113) Planets without moons may tumble over long periods of time, leading to extreme climate change.
Gas giant atmospheres are primarily composed of molecular hydrogen, and also contain various amounts of helium, methane, ethane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide (ice), water (ice), tibanna, prothium, beskium, and rethen. Many gas giants have been seeded with ecologies taken from planets like Bespin, which has a layer of atmosphere breathable by Humans and, more importantly, supports the beldon, which concentrate tibanna.
Most habitable planets in the galaxy start out as scumworlds: moderately wet worlds covered in biofilms, fungi, lichens, and mats of bacteria and algae. They appear to have been seeded on the order of a billion years ago by a species that palæoxenobiologists would love to know more about, and have dubbed the Seeders. Scumworlds usually have breathable atmospheres, but little else to recommend them. They’re very easy to seed with more complex life forms.
On some worlds, the scum evolves into multicellular life. Once this level of organization is achieved, it rapidly diversifies in a manner similar to the Cambrian explosion on Earth. Such planets still look like scumworlds outside the oceans.
Given a few hundred million years, these worlds develop a wide variety
of complex life. These cornucopia worlds
are quite
rare, and prized for their diversity of life forms that can be adapted
to other uses. Most of the habitable planets in the galaxy are the
result of seeding scumworlds with life forms chosen from cornucopia
worlds.
Some useful formulae: horizon distance is √h(2R+h), with h the height of the observer and R the radius of the planet— about 5km for humans on Earth. This also gives the range at which you can see an object of a given height.
The typical planet has enough water to provide oceans and enough continental crust to provide some land out of it. Climates vary across the surface, from ice caps to deserts. Even when such planets are in periods of glaciation (World-Building p101), they have habitable land at the equator; part of planetary management is controlling the climate to maximize the habitable land area.
Relatively warm planets (like Earth in the late Cretaceous) can be lush and green all the way up into arctic regions during the summer. The local fauna may be adapted to toughing out the winter or migrating vast distances when the dark of the year approaches.
Planets that lack significant amounts of the lighter rocks that form continental crust are almost entirely covered in water, though they may have a few chains of volcanic islands. Without continents to get in the way of storms, the warm tropical waters have hurricanes year-round. (World-Building p79.)
Ice worlds (World-Building p91) are more than just standard worlds going through an ice age; they have life that can function at freezing temperatures and still extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With life pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, the planet never warms and most of the planetary surface is buried beneath a layer of ice. These planets are only inhabited when there are resources worth digging under the ice to extract or the planet is a worthwhile place for a shipping depot.
Planets with too little water to provide large bodies of water to
provide temperature regulation experience wide swings in temperature,
even if the planet otherwise has a reasonable axial tilt and day
length. Without water to lubricate the tectonic plates, the whole
cycle of mountain forming can shut down and end the formation of
mountains; without rain to remove dust from the atmosphere, it can
accumulate and block sunlight, chilling the planet the way volcanic
ash clouds do. (World-Building p72,80.)
Tatooine is an extreme example of a desert
planet, and geologists believe that its oceans were removed
mere thousands of years before the founding of the Sith Galactic
Empire. Most desert
planets are dominated by a single
large supercontinent, with habitable coastlines and a dry interior
prone to extremes of temperature.
Typical categorization of planets is economic. Climate is a secondary concern.
Planets with native intelligent life usually have that species as the bulk of the population. When a world shows significant resistance to Sith dominion, however, they often resettle large chunks of population, swapping with other worlds and creating ethnic tensions that make it easy to keep them all under the overlord’s thumb.
Worlds with at most a small outpost. Population in the thousands or less.
Colony worlds that consist mostly of wilderness, with homesteaders carving out new territory. Population in the tens of thousands to millions. Mining colonies concentrate on resource extraction, but almost always have enough farms of some sort (even if they’re vertical farms or algae vats) to feed themselves, though they might prefer agriworld luxuries when they can afford them.
Most roads are dirt, or occasionally paved as a collective effort to avoid trouble in the winter; most colony worlds prefer to use repulsorlift or all-terrain craft whenever possible to avoid having to maintain roads.
Frontier worlds seldom have any regulation on coming and going; spaceports are there as an economic convenience rather than an enforced chokepoint.
Even frontier worlds usually have a constellation of microsats in low orbit, though with nowhere near the bandwidth of an industrialized planet. These are seeded by the first colonizer ship. As settlements grow, they begin putting in local communications nodes, and then begin laying communications cables between settlements along the power conduits and rail links. A planetary hyperwave link is a big investment; usually the planet’s infonets buy copies of the latest broadcasts from the databanks of visiting ships.
Pirates looking to shake down a colony world will threaten to destroy their microsats, which in turn leads to such worlds offering incentives for retired fighter pilots to join colonies and keep a well-maintained old fighter in their barn for such occasions. The sight of a motley squadron of fighters doing precision maneuvering is enough to deter many pirates, so demonstrations of formation flying are a common sight during major holidays on frontier planets.
Worlds hosting an indigenous sentient species. A planet whose population was still at a neolithic technology level may have a population of a few million that is barely noticeable from orbit; a Bronze Age culture may have tens of millions, some living in cities, with vast swathes of unexplored territory; an Iron Age culture can sustain hundreds of millions and cover much of a planet; a Steam Age culture can sustain a billion and leave few areas unpopulated. The greater the native population, the less likely they will be swamped by colonists. Some will react to galactic contact by flourishing and adopting new technology; this sometimes leads to the planet industrializing and a population boom that reaches billions in a few generations, and sometimes leads to concentrating their resources on smaller numbers of offspring and keeping an abnormally low population for a high-tech world. Some react poorly to outside ideas and ways, and their technological development stagnates as they cling to the familiar; such worlds can persist at the same tech level for millennia.
Agrarian worlds have been largely tamed, with all arable land (other than occasional wilderness preserves that are kept for ecological management or hunting) devoted to fields and pastures, with metropoleis that spring up at the major processing and shipping centers. Major predators are confined to zoos and wilderness preserves. These planets can be self-sufficient if they have enough metals, only needing interstellar trade to get a supply of gravitic knots to sustain repulsorlift technology. Population is in the hundreds of millions. Food production is usually by individual families unless there’s serious pressure for efficiency (such as a nearby ecumenopolis that needs bread and circuses).
The typical agrarian world turned up on a survey as dominated by mosses, lichens, slime-molds, and other simple life forms covering its land and seas; with photosynthesis operating, the planet already had an oxygen atmosphere. The scout ship, drawing on the contingency biopackage in its hold, would seed likely looking spots with a selection of soil bacteria, earthworms, grasses, and other such highly evolved organisms, then head on back to inhabited space. While the scouts went through the process of negotiation to auction off the location of the new planet to a homesteading consortium, the alien organisms would be spreading across the planet, mercilessly outcompeting the crude native flora and fauna. By the time the first colonists arrived, the presurveyed landing sites would already be carpeted in familiar grasses and wildflowers, and the soil thoroughly churned and filled with delicious nitrogen. Without any serious native biological competition, the planet would be covered in decades.
Most roads are created by coalitions of farmers who want to get their goods to market. Landowners who don’t chip in when it’s time to help with road maintenance usually find the lord turning a blind eye toward reprisals.
Some agriworlds do tree farming, creating high-quality lumber for export to the extremely wealthy. Logs are processed onworld and the lumber placed in climate-controlled shipping containers that will make sure the wood is appropriately seasoned by the time it arrives at market.
Spaceports are usually near the largest shipping depots. Wealthy folks that live nearby have their own defenses for being able to make sure that if an out-of-control spacecraft is plunging toward their house, its debris won’t rain on their property. The less wealthy have to hope that there aren’t many out-of-control spacecraft. Someone will probably notice if you land your ship elsewhere, but it’s up to the owner of that territory to decide if they want to stop you.
Megacities and megalopoleis are characteristic features of industrialized worlds, and wilderness is usually found in managed preserves. Some of these suffer from serious pollution problems. Those that dream of being ecumenopoleis build linear cities along their transit lines as a starting nucleus. Food production is usually handled by large organizations using mechanical harvesting. Population is in the billions.
Richer megalopoleis have large force fields that can be used as defenses against orbital bombardment as well as shields against extreme weather. Some only raise them to keep out hurricanes and storm surge (the low pressure under a hurricane can raise sea levels over 6m on a terrestrial world), while others will squander energy on keeping a balmy environment during a blizzard.
Megacities usually have underground transport systems, as digging one of those is superb cover for putting in other underground fortifications. Transit systems are usually built solidly enough that the population can shelter there if the city is under bombardment. (Short of that kind of mandate from a lord, large-scale public works like that don’t happen unless a population gets very organized. At that point, all manner of chaos may erupt when the portion of the population that didn’t pay for that new sewer or subway finds digging machines blasting through their basements, or being offered as much money to move out of their home as it would take to have them evicted by force...)
Megacities are often piped for a variety of services: liquid hydrogen chills superconducting cables that provide electricity, provides as much cold as anyone needs for refrigeration, and can fill up fuel tanks. Similarly well-insulated pipes carry heat (straight from the fusion plant) for everything from home to industrial use. The most important pipes are usually deeply buried and difficult to disrupt, with less extreme exchangers going up to the surface.
All maintained roads are toll roads, and vehicles without a credit transponder may be fired upon by roadside gun emplacements. Subways have no turnstiles; your personal talisman pays your way, and it’s widely known that the standard policy is to spend as much on punishing freeloaders as freeloaders cost the system.
Spaceports on industrialized worlds are carefully arranged as chokepoints for starships. Pilots who lack insurance aren’t allowed to attempt to land on a planet or dock at its orbital facilities.
An ecumenopolis is a world-city: a planet completely covered by sprawl, with occasional exceptions for parks and wilderness preserves. (Some parks go down to bedrock; others qualify as very large rooftop gardens. Lakes ten miles across aren’t much from orbit, but can support recreational sailing and— with the aid of tractor beams— surfing.) These are worlds where people begin building spacescrapers— skyscrapers more than a mile high that need to be pressurized to avoid people getting altitude sickness and burst eardrums after elevator rides— and start connecting them together, eventually completely hiding the streets between them. The most important construction material for these is composisteel, which is used to make the support pylons, which are sometimes the only thing left standing after assault by orbital bombardment or a salvage fleet. They are socketed deeply in bedrock; there are districts of Coruscant near subduction zones where the pylons are a few degrees off vertical because they’ve been standing for so long. The most extreme ones, like Coruscant, have covered even their oceans (and have gigantic cisterns full of water and immense reserves of salt blocks); younger ones like Taris have only covered their land surface with buildings.
The levels of the city:
There is also a huge emphasis on recycling, since there’s no natural ecosystem to do it:
Planets importing large amounts of grain from other worlds often find that they have a surplus of fertilizer, which they then export.
Ecumenopoleis sport a wide variety of extreme sports for the daring, ranging from geocaching that sometimes involves trespassing to algae-vat surfing.
The updrafts from heat circulation are spectacular, and hang gliding on the resulting thermals is a popular sport.
TO DO: run waste heat calculations. Population density for Manhattan is 25,845/km2]; for Earth, 43/km2 of land (= 150 million km2) or 13/km2 of surface area (= 510 million km2). If that population density is sustained over the entire planet, you get 12.75 trillion people, so Coruscant’s population of a trillion actually implies a population density more like 2000/km2, less than Tokyo at 5796/km2— figure that it’s more like Manhattan in the residential districts, and much more sparse in the industrial ones. Note that they have much more control over albedo and atmospheric composition than a natural world, so they can vary the greenhouse parameters. Also check water requirements; a person needs 1000m3 per year for drinking, hygiene, and growing food. How does 1015 m3 compare to an ocean? Plus the use for being an industrial powerhouse? Water Footprint may come in handy.
Out of five thousand habitable planets in the empire, the majority of the galaxy’s known population is concentrated in the ecumenopoleis, most of which are in the Core Worlds: Alsakan, Anaxes, Ator, Axxila, Carratos, Coruscant, Denon, Eriadu, Gerrenthum, Grizmallt, Humbarine, Lianna, Taris, Trantor, Vorzyd V, Yabol Opa. Each world has from 100 billion to 1 trillion sentients. As long as a ruler can keep up the streams of raw materials coming from asteroid and comet miners, an ecumenopolis world has tremendous manufacturing capability; even without it, they are able to perform amazing amounts of knowledge work.
In the Core region, stars are close together and many routes well-known. Going out into the further reaches of the galaxy, civilization clusters around the trade routes and spreads progressively thinner thereafter.
If two systems are further apart than six and a half light-years, it can be profitable to set up a subspace relay. These usually consist of an aging cargo freighter with cargo spaces kitted out with standard space station habitation modules, fuel tanks, and subspace relay equipment. Mass is no longer important as long as it can move around at all; there’s no sense in trying to make such a vehicle maneuverable, as the only threats that they have to deal with are either far too fast to try to avoid or easily predicted through applied astrophysics. The ship limps out on its aging hyperdrive and parks itself midway between two star systems, with a dedicated partner on either end of the link (either a base station in a star system or another relay). Base stations are usually in an orbit perpendicular to the line from their primary to the relay. Relays drift in interstellar space or park in a long orbit around a brown dwarf, again perpendicular to the line connecting their customers; sometimes they will hook up with a cometary iceball for convenient volatiles.
Since such a ship is usually the nearest thing to anyone whose hyperdrive breaks down between star systems, they often have rescue facilities, and become a full-fledged way station. Way stations are usually not very good prizes for pirates, as most of their wealth exists in banks at the end of their link, and interrupting communications tends to make the banks irate. (The banks all trade information encrypted by one-time pads carried by courier ships, so they couldn’t care less if anyone eavesdrops.)
You will always find:
It’s common to find:
tow truckvessels that can do repairs in the field or haul your light freighter into the repair bays.
dippership that can hyper to the nearest gas giant, scoop up hydrogen, and bring it back to top off the tanks of the way station.
It is rumored that some way stations contain:
Chop shopsthat can render your stolen vessel impossible to recognize by insurance investigators who would want to retrieve it.
Military relay frigates are a different matter. They are designed to jump around to particular locations on a prearranged schedule, and are deployed in groups of at least three for redundancy. During peacetime, they’re only out on maneuvers; you can always tell if someone’s feeling nervous or wants to make someone else think so when they deploy their relay frigates.
Civilizations do fall. If shifting stars close the last hyperspace route to a planet (or even a cluster of stars), and they have no convenient black hole in the area for manufacturing gravitic knots, they will gradually lose a vital resource for maintaining repulsorlift technology. Planets that allow themselves to overspecialize and become dependent on trade for vital goods can fall to a blockade or a sufficiently large infestation of space pirates.
A sufficiently nasty plague can lead to a planetary quarantine; galactic medics are vigilant against such problems, but a disease can spread like wildfire on an industrialized or ecumenopolis world.
While Sith prefer to capture planets intact, along with manufacturing capabilities and productive population, there are times when strategy calls for crippling an opponent’s supply lines. War can easily wipe out the best and brightest of a planet and set technology back by centuries.
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