New Dawn Settlement Authority

The New Dawn Settlement Authority is a public body chartered in 2150 by the Martian regional assemblies to plan, fund and supply new permanent settlements in the outer system. Its first two targets are the Kraken shoreline on Titan and the Uruk plains on Ganymede.

New Dawn is the launch customer for the Meridian Colony Ark, with two hulls on order at 8,950 million credits each. A Meridian is 2.4 kilometres long, carries 4,800 settlers and 260,000 tonnes of equipment, and is flown by a flight crew of 12 with 340 crew aboard. Its 300 AU range covers any destination in the Saturn system with reserves. The Authority chose the ark over a convoy of smaller ships because a single hull can be built as a ready-made town: its habitat modules detach and become the first buildings on the ground.

Nine Cascade Dropships will land those modules and their people, 220 tonnes or 60 passengers at a time. Two Gravitas Dock Barges help assemble the arks at the Olympus Ring yard, and three Atlas Heavy Freighters run pre-positioning cargo ahead of each departure.

Planners at New Dawn estimate each ark mission will cost around 14,000 million credits including dropships, supplies and pre-positioned freight. That works out to under three million credits per settler, far less than the cost of supplying a new outpost one small ship at a time.

The first ark, Meridian-1, is scheduled to leave Mars orbit for Titan once fitting-out completes. Arjun Mehta, Halcyon's yard operations director at the Olympus Ring, leads the build programme.