Meridian Manufacturing

Founding
The Periphery planet known as New St. Andrews was the target of occasional raiding expeditions mounted by its neighbors and by various groups of pirates, some of which were intended to determine whether there were readily accessible mineral resources on the planet worthy of exploitation. In 3058 one of those raids uncovered valuable rare minerals, and by 3059 a mining operation had been established to extract those minerals. It was this that would prove the catalyst responsible for the creation of the company known as Meridian Manufacturing.

The construction and ongoing presence of this illegal mining operation convinced the MacGreggor clan that it would be impossible to have peace on New St. Andrews unless the clans were able to defend themselves against hostile outside interests. This led to the various clans making efforts to both eject the illegal mining operation and to recruit the appropriate talented people from the Inner Sphere to help provide New St. Andrews with an organic defense industry. Both of these milestones were achieved in 3060 when the mining operation was shut down and Meridian Manufacturing was officially founded.

Prior to the establishment of Meridian Manufacturing the defense industry on New St. Andrews had been limited to producing copies of the Scorpion light tank and Vedette medium tank, although it had proven impossible to replicate the modern weapons on the two designs, limiting those vehicles produced on New St. Andrews to ancient, pre-Age of War designs such as the Machine Gun and Heavy Rifle. With the founding of Meridian Manufacturing New St. Andrews began to take steps towards the manufacture of BattleMechs for the first time. The development program was bedeviled with the same problem, however - Meridian couldn't replicate a basic autocannon, leading to the first 'Mech to be produced on New St. Andrews, the armed IndustrialMech known as the ARB-100 Arbiter, being armed with the same primitive weaponry.

Despite the limitations of the Arbiter it proved to be remarkably successful in generating off-world sales, in part because of its ferocious appearance, and New St. Andrews soon had orders pouring in from neighboring worlds and the mercenary market due to its low price. Despite the unexpected success, a steady stream of hostile raids against New St. Andrews that specifically targeted the Meridian Manufacturing plant hampered efforts to enter full production, and as a consequence full production wasn't reached until 3074, fourteen years after the founding of the company.

The Dark Age
It was reported in 3081 that Meridian Manufacturing had not only begun production of a new variant of their Arbiter IndustrialMech, but that licensing to produce Wasp and Stinger BattleMechs had also been purchased. It remained to be seen whether these BattleMechs would be produced using RetroTech technology or the comparatively more modern Succession Wars level of technology.

Manufacturing
Meridian Manufacturing has a manufacturing center on the following planet: