First introduced in 2652, the giant Saturn Harvester was intended to compete with the highly automated harvesting robots developed during the Star League years. With new water purification and terraforming technology opening up many worlds for settlement, the colonists were finding their manpower was stretched to the limit and so they purchased the expensive robots. Earthwerks saw a chance to beat the vaunted Terran Hegemony technology with a self-contained, lightly-manned harvester, and soon began marketing it to the colonists. Considerably more expensive than a fleet of smaller vehicles, though cheaper than a Hegemony robot, the three-man crew of the Saturn can cover the same acreage as an entire team of standard harvesters.

         The crews of these vehicles often follow a nomadic lifestyle, traveling in mighty convoys as they follow the shifts of the seasons and the harvest. With virtually unlimited range provided by a fusion power plant, the harvesters can operate independent of road networks and are fully amphibious. Vehicles often carry automatic food processing equipment that can accommodate both food crops gathered through a combine system and meat animals. Earthwerks promotional material proudly announces that their system can "go from hoof to freeze-pack in under twenty minutes." Conveyer and cargo lifts allow the vehicle to off-load packaged products even while on the move.

         Although the original reasons behind the Saturn’s design faded as populations grew, they remain in service on many worlds. The capability of processing on-site eliminates the cost of transporting waste material that will only be discarded later. In large scale operations the savings can be considerable-certainly more than enough to justify keeping these titans of the fields in service. Because of this, Earthwerks maintains production lines capable of building spare parts to keep the existing Saturns in service at their three largest factory complexes. The full factories that once assembled them are long gone, but with the help of construction robots they can assemble a Saturn from the on-site parts stockpile in a matter of weeks whenever an order for one comes in.