Habitat

A habitat is a sealed station designed for civilian habitation, either installed on a planet's surface or built as their own space stations.

Human
Humanity makes extensive use of habitats. While terrestrial colonies are now widespread in the 26th century, a significant portion of the human population still live in pressurized installations and space stations. Early ventures into terrestrial habitation were dependent on sealed habitats. Even today, a number of fairly established inner colonies are either collections of domed cities, underground warrens, space habitats or habitat-aggregations, as their low habitability rating prevents economical terraforming. The exact design of habitats vary, as while some were purpose-built structures, others started out life as mined-out asteroids.

Unlike the Covenant, humanity's significantly less time with slipspace technologies meant that most of their habitats are effectively limited to the star systems they were built in. While they do have limited maneuvering capabilities for stationkeeping and emergencies, they are inherently fragile and unable to withstand the stresses that come with slipstream transitions. The few habitats which do have a capability for cheaply mounting a Shaw-Fujikawa engine incorporated this feature into their original designs, and are typically much younger than the vast majority of stations in existence.

The largest collection of habitats were all consolidated within the Sol system, fueled by Earth's overpopulation issues; because the early human space age lacked the sophisticated terraforming technologies of even the 24th century, space habitation was only possible in pressurized installations. These were generally clustered around the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn orbital zones, although this wasn't the rule and small trading outposts had been established all throughout the system. Because of their cost, smaller habitats were generally preferred, but regulations later mandated the installation of some form of large space in order to combat cabin fever suffered by their populations. Still, significant orbital neighborhoods arose even around colonies with Earth-like qualities, due to various needs to work in space or conduct industrial operations that are either expensive or not possible in anything but a microgravity environment.