System: Halstead Station

The founding of Halstead Station traces back to the early days of human expansion, when the growing Ozawa Mercantile Association sought to ensure its dominion of the “northwest” region of the galaxy, through a chain of stations under its complete control. Unfortunately, the system chosen for one of the way stations lacked one small requirement: a habitable world.

Because it was rich in minerals, particularly in the asteroid belt and on the third planet, a poisonous rock encased in a deadly argon-cyanide atmosphere, the system could not be ignored as a candidate. Engineers under the command of Geoffrey Halstead, one of the Association’s more visionary directors, established Halstead Station in 2207 and renamed the world after their new colony.

Halstead Station, more than merely a domed settlement on a poisonous wasteland, was actually a labyrinth of underground tunnels; huge surface and subsurface storehouses; and massive, environmentally sealed habitats that when completed, covered nearly three percent of the tiny planet’s surface. When the growing Draconis Combine finally crushed the Ozawas, Halstead Station, as one of the Association’s few surviving facilities, fell into the hands of House Kurita, which quickly assigned a significant portion of the ever-expanding facilities to military use.

Over the centuries, Halstead Station has seen use as a military supply base, a maximum-security prison, and a place where dishonored soldiers were sent to reflect upon their mistakes. Though Halstead Station continued to expand as extensive mining drilled out more underground tunnels, the quality of life for its inhabitants gradually began to decline.

The world is most famous for the events of 3013, the so-called “Battle of Halstead Station.” At the very beginning of Prince Hanse Davion’s reign, the MIIO reported that Combine construction crews had stumbled across the ruins of a Star League-era university housing a huge, unopened vault. Realizing how important the contents of that vault might be, Hanse rushed ahead with the raid plans and decided to personally lead the attack.

What was planned as a simple objective raid, turned into a month long battle, but luck was with the young Prince, however. When Prince Davion’s ‘Mechs broke into the vault, he and his men found rows upon rows of books and computer memory cubes. Hanse and his troops carried off as many of the books as time would permit, burning what they could not carry. Unofficial sources say that over three thousand books and other materials were taken away from the vault, most of them on highly technical subjects.

The Halstead Collection, as it came to be known, formed the centerpiece of the Prince’s ideas for the New Avalon Institute of Science. Today, the Halstead Collection is housed in the NAIS in an environmentally controlled library.

There are no functional factories located on this planet.