Upon receiving intelligence from their vast network of spies suggesting the Alliance were building Sleeper Ships to escape their clutches, the Sol Coalition's war machine turned its entire production capability toward the construction of a Sleeper Ship flotilla. The Alliance's departure date was such a tightly kept secret that even the Coalition 's spies could not determine the answer. As a result, the Coalition decided to build a massive number of small ships as quickly as physically possible rather than toil away at larger ones to end up being disappointed.
It turned out that the Coalition's building time was but a matter of weeks. In this time, one Sleeper Shuttle, Novgorod, was completed in secret at the secret construction site on Mars' moon, Deimos. Construction sites capable of producing Sleeper Shuttles littered Earth and Mars itself, but the facility on Deimos had been the only one available. Despite the Coalition's endeavours to free up extra facilities for Sleeper Shuttle production, the Alliance's stiff resistance meant that the war effort could not afford to lose the massively superior number of ship production facilities to produce a ship that would not be useful in combat and may not even be needed. The Coalition High Command feared a sudden Alliance offensive that could take advantage of their weakened war production.
The next Sleeper Shuttle, Tyumen, was never completed. The Coalition High Command had finalised its attack plans on the Alliance base on one of the moons in orbit of Jupiter, believed to be the construction sight of the five Sleeper Ships. They believed the Sleeper Ships could be destroyed right there and then - their spy in the Alliance facility suggested they were weeks away from completion.
Despite their confidence however, the Coalition High Command had learnt through the one hundred years of bitter fighting that plans did not always go as planned. Novgorod was launched with Communist philosophers, young politicians and "breeders" - couples who had agreed to be a part of the new colony and could create a sizeable gene pool in the new Coalition.