Minor Faction
Throne World: Kalaprus II
Major Rivals: LithoCorp
Building the future
Notus have developed some of the most impressive, and destructive, terraforming devices ever conceived. Original image: B Börkur Eiriksson
The Notus Mining Collegiate, also known as NMC, is the galaxy’s premiere terraforming corporation, rivalled only by LithoCorp. Over the last century, Notus has become notorious for its involvement in the wholesale strip-mining of various planets and leaving behind shattered wreckages which can no longer sustain life.
In more recent times, Notus have invested in a series of expensive up-scale advertising campaigns illustrating various planets they have terraformed and returned to habitability, but most still suspect these planets are in the minority. Most brochures rarely investigate the means by which such worlds were made habitable, nor whether their entire biospheres are anywhere near ready for (mostly human) habitation.
Notus runs a little-understood project codenamed NMDS-1, heavily funded by the New Order Corporation and championed by several powerful Imperial governors. Largely hidden from public view, it appears to be little more than a research operation at present, with its stated aim being the discovery of a means of breaking planets into smaller sections or even into a large asteroid field, in turn rendering its core mineral content much more accessible by efficient mining processes. Without the need to drill deep into planetary mantles, automated zero-gravity machines could simply install themselves in mineral-rich asteroids and haul their payload to a central processing station.
When the project was announced, Notus drew heavy criticism from some quarters, most suggesting that the program was a thinly-veiled shroud for some kind of military research program run by NOC for the benefit of the Imperial Navy. However, the project appears to have stalled, and several recent HoloNet exposés have criticised NMC in particular for their mishandling of NOC funds.