So what 'Mechs does Niops produce at the Workshop? I'm thinking of buying some Highlanders and building a company around them, and going with Niops as a faction for them.
Prior to their destruction, the only named designs mentioned as being produced by the Workshops are the Highlander, the Black Knight, the Burke Defense Tank, according to
Field Manual: Periphery - don't ask for an exact page number, because my paper copy is in storage. There are implications that an SLDF heavy aerospace fighter was also produced, but the design was never named. It was not stated that these were the only designs that the Workshops could produce, just that they're the only ones actually named. Tech Readout 3075 also adds the Nighthawk PA(L) in a couple varieties, indicating that production started in 3071. There are purportedly a total of 16 Nighthawks still in use in Niops in 3150, serving as security forces on Niops VII.
Note that, post-Jihad, the Workshops are destroyed and, as of Field Manual 3150, they had not been rebuilt, forcing the Niops Association Militia to use whatever units still survived, whatever Blakist designs they could presumably salvage, and what they could buy on the open market, so at that point, it's vastly open to interpretation. Note that not even the
Periphery General MUL list is useful here, given that Niops is too small a faction to even be tracked there, and that list is more of a supplemental to the dedicated lists for the tracked individual Periphery factions.
Personally, the way I'm selecting forces for my local Alpha Strike league, where I'm playing a Niopian unit is to use the Terran Hegemony and SLDF General lists from the Star League era, to which I'd add the Periphery General list for any era after the Jihad - we're only allowed one list for our game, and the Terran Hegemony list gave me an interesting variety of units, ranging from a handful of Royals to a few Primitives.
