Judice’s environment is one of the harshest ever encountered in known space. The planet’s surface is an indescribably barren wasteland of rock and sand that has been blasted and scorched by the corrosive atmosphere, which consists primarily of gaseous nitric acid. What little precipitation falls is quite literally acid rain, and scars the tortured landscape with jagged crevasses and canyons before running off into "seas" of liquid nitric acid. And, as if all this was not inhospitable enough, Judice has no water, its gravity is above standard, and the average surface temperature is a sultry 33 degrees Celsius.

Point of Interest: Native Complex Lifeforms

Judice is so absolutely unsuited for habitation by any of the major species that no government, corporation, or individual bothered to lay claim to it until the early 1100s. At that point, the planet began to excite great interest in the interstellar scientific community due to the discovery of a group of complex lifeforms that had somehow managed to evolve and flourish in the hellish environment of Judice’s nitric acid seas. Several reputable xenologists have even theorized that certain of these lifeforms possessed a limited degree of sentience.

In 1103, Imperial Research Station Eta was established just offshore of the largest sea with the mission of studying these exotic and fascinating lifeforms.