Location from Dune by Frank Herbert
The Imperial prison planet — a world of punishing extremes that secretly serves as the breeding ground for the Emperor's elite Sardaukar terror troops.
Salusa Secundus is designed to kill. The official story is that it's a prison planet — the worst criminals in the Imperium are dumped here and forgotten. The real story is that the Emperor sends prisoners here specifically to be broken and remade. The ones who survive the planet's lethal environment, the starvation rations, the constant inter-prisoner violence — those survivors are recruited into the Sardaukar. The conditions mirror Arrakis in their severity, which is the Imperium's great unspoken irony: the Fremen, shaped by an equally harsh world, are the only force that could match the Sardaukar in combat. The Emperor knows this. It terrifies him. Six out of every thirteen prisoners sent here die in the first year. The survivors develop a fanaticism born of shared suffering — exactly the quality the Sardaukar require. The planet is a weapon disguised as a punishment.
A landscape of contradiction — vast salt flats baking under a white sun, volcanic ridges venting toxic gas, ice fields at the poles that crack and shift with tectonic groans. The terrain shifts between biomes with brutal abruptness: desert to tundra in fifty kilometers. Prisoner camps are clusters of ferrocrete bunkers half-buried in whatever terrain surrounds them. The sky is a pale, washed-out blue that gives no warmth. Training compounds for Sardaukar recruits are hidden in the most lethal terrain — volcanic calderas, radiation zones, predator-dense forests.
Also known as: the Prison Planet, the Emperor's Hell, Sardaukar homeworld