The Ark from George R. R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging.
Originally intended as a seedship to autonomously travel to the stars and use its extensive onboard biotech equipment to terraform planets for later human colonization. Thousands of years and the fall of the civilization which created it later, it gets used for considerably more skeevy purposes such as:
- Technobarbarians who've rebuilt to cold war space race levels show up in the equivalent of a mercury capsule with a piece of cutlery used by the leader of an enemy nation at a diplomatic state dinner and ask the ship to synthesize a plague which will be utterly deadly to anyone with the enemy leader's specific DNA but everyone else will be asymptomatic carriers.
- An army of not!tyranid living biotech combat drones spawned from cloning vats, built without unnecessary digestive systems since they won't survive long enough in battle to need them and instinctively programmed to follow orders and use firearms.
- Genetically engineered catgirls for domestic companionship. Who are kept in chemically induced comas until purchased at slave auctions since their brains are instinctively programmed to imprint like ducklings upon the first person they see who'll hopefully be their owner.
- As the florida man said, make my dog immortal.
The Odyssey from Horizon Forbidden West.
While the ship itself is pretty pathetic being unarmed and STL, I mostly just want five things it comes with:
- APOLLO, an artificially intelligent archive of all human culture, media, technological knowlage (up to a point considerably beyond our own, capable of building it and the starship housing it) which was designed to raise humans from frozen embryos and educate them in its contents entirely without human input necessary.
- Some pretty incredible biotech medicine/transhumanist augmentation for immortality.
- Awesome nanotech which might equally well be power armor or built into the users' body granting flight, a built-in deflector shield and Armstrong-style nanocyborgism.
- Entirely autonomous manufacturing infrastructure.
- Robot army which can be replenished as necessary from said infrastructure.
A Fourth Empire battlemoon (not Dahak himself, I'd prefer something nonsentient/without free will) from David Weber's Dahak trilogy.
Moon-sized warship autonomous enough to work with only a single completely untrained crewman like myself, possessing FTL drive, FTL communications, stargate-style portal technology, enough self-repair and backup systems to continue functioning without external maintenance for 200,000 years, planet-killing quantities of weaponry including smaller parasite-docked ships and super-biotech transhumanist medical technology only slightly inferior to the Zenith variety. Only problem being, how much of a jackass ROB is being in regards to where they choose to put it. It'll send a shuttle, either of its own variety or the Zenith version to pick me up on earth and won't either be uselessly out of my reach in space or worse, materialized on earth with predictable consequences, right?
My plan is simple, I'm gonna leave. Augment myself till I can live long enough to see my self-appointed mission through and travel the universe, stopping at every single potentially hospitable planet, terraforming them and planting colonies of cloned humans to be raised by copies of APOLLO. Continuing indefinitely until either:
- The ship outright wears out.
- Outside Context Problems such as hostile aliens capable of destroying the ship.
- Previously established colonies build up enough to send out colonization expeditions of their own rendering the whole thing pointless since wherever I go, someone else already got there first.
- Universal heat death.
.600.92391.jpg)