Building the Meridian

Development update. Everything described here is work in progress and may change.

The Meridian is the first place you see in Nova Eridani, and for a while it is the only place. Before you ever set foot on the planet, you spend time inside a damaged ship trying to make it work again. That made it one of the first things we needed to get right, and one of the things we have changed most.

A cargo ship, not a colony ship

It would have been easy to make the Meridian the kind of colony vessel you would expect: purpose-built, generous and a little too clean. That never fitted the story. If Earth was collapsing as quickly as the setting suggests, nobody had the decades needed to design and build a dedicated colony ship.

So the Meridian became something else. She is a long-range industrial cargo hauler, registered as Kestrel-Haldane Freight, Hull 2211, that was converted for the Nova Eridani expedition in a hurry. That single decision answered a lot of design questions at once.

• The ship is long and mostly structural, roughly 520 metres from shield to drive.
• Most of the volume is cargo, machinery and fabrication capacity rather than living space.
• Human spaces are compact. The normal operational crew is around four.
• Additions such as drop pods, solar arrays and radiators look bolted on, because they were.

Schematic

Redesigning the shield

The forward debris shield has been redesigned. A single solid disc reads well from a distance, but it does not make much sense as engineering, and it makes the ship look like a toy.

The current shield is layered: stacked plates mounted on a long boom, well ahead of the rest of the hull. The idea is that debris meets the shield first, breaks up, and spends its energy before it reaches anything important. It also gives the ship a distinctive silhouette, which matters when you will be looking up at it from the surface later.

It also sets up the opening. The Meridian crossed a debris stream on the way, and the shield did its job, but not perfectly. Much of what you repair in the first hours traces back to that crossing.

Fitting people into a freighter

The interior has been the most interesting constraint. Corridors are narrow. Rooms are where they are because a cargo ship had space there, not because an architect chose it. The recovery suite, crew quarters and service areas feel retrofitted, with exposed structure and equipment fitted wherever it would go.

That tightness is useful for the opening sequence. You are moving through a ship that was never designed for you, restoring power and communications, and it should feel slightly wrong to be there.

The bridge

The bridge is the payoff. After the cramped interior, it is the first place with a view, and it is where you first see Nova Eridani properly. The layout is built around making that moment land: the route there, where the window sits, and what you are doing when the planet comes into view.

What is next

The ship introduction is playable in current development builds, from waking in the recovery cradle through to boarding a drop pod. The work now is refinement: pacing, lighting, terminal interfaces and making Melanie's guidance feel natural rather than scripted. We will share in-engine captures once they are representative.