Unusual Spaceship Ideas?

[Buzzardo]

I've been having fun making spaceships with GURPS Spaceships. I set up a spreadsheet and went to town.

I've made all the usual things: full range of warships and their smallcraft, liners, freighters, freighter-liners, orbital forts, orbital commercial platforms, tugs, mining ships, scout ships, survey ships, etc. - even a small infiltration ship.

Anyone have ideas for unusual purposes for a ship? I have the itch to make more ships, but I don't want to make more of the same.

Thanks.

[kdtipa]

Spy ships (stuff with great stealth tech)?
Drop ships (stuff designed specifically for re-entry)?
Garbage haulers (maybe stuff that dumps garbage into suns)?
Colony ships (huge ships meant to bring people and supplies to new systems)?
Terraformer ships (ships sent ahead to begin the process of making a planet livable)?
Luxury Yacht ships (stuff rich people would buy. Like a liner but smaller)?
Automated...
- exploration (drone to get info about new systems)?
- communication (intelligent comm relays that place themselves at certain intervals)?
- "roadside assist" (vehicles that listen for distress signals)?
Emergency/Medical ships (anything from ambulance sized to liner sized moving medical facility)?

[Ulzgoroth]

It's only moderately exotic, but I put together a stealth-based warship that doesn't use superscience stealth...

[thrash]

Q ships can be fun. They also (ironically) make good pirates in their own right.

Colony ships might be interesting, especially if they were designed to be dismantled at the destination and converted to infrastructure.

Bioships (using the rules in Spaceships 7) that don't have any purpose beyond "survival of the fittest" are another possibility. Extra points for Cthulhu references.

[Phantasm]

Some of the things I made with Spaceships aren't technically spaceships, as I left off engines. Some interesting cargo containers, asteroid mines, O'Neill Cylinders, and stuff like that.

[Buzzardo]

Originally Posted by kdtipa

Spy ships (stuff with great stealth tech)?
Drop ships (stuff designed specifically for re-entry)?
Garbage haulers (maybe stuff that dumps garbage into suns)?
Colony ships (huge ships meant to bring people and supplies to new systems)?
Terraformer ships (ships sent ahead to begin the process of making a planet livable)?
Luxury Yacht ships (stuff rich people would buy. Like a liner but smaller)?
Automated...
- exploration (drone to get info about new systems)?
- communication (intelligent comm relays that place themselves at certain intervals)?
- "roadside assist" (vehicles that listen for distress signals)?
Emergency/Medical ships (anything from ambulance sized to liner sized moving medical facility)?

I have a couple sizes of hospital ships. A yacht or three is an idea, and I like the idea of totally automated ships. Thanks. :)

Originally Posted by thrash

Q ships can be fun. They also (ironically) make good pirates in their own right.

Egads! How did I forget Q ships! They've been a favorite idea of mine ever since I read about the Q ships used in WWII. Thanks. :)

No offense to anyone I didn't quote. It's just that I've done those ideas or they're not appropriate to the setting. It's TL 12^ - a slow ship goes Warp 2. It also features highly advanced AI (the Empress has declared that AIs are people and have all the rights of anyone else), so automated ships are a good fit.

Thanks to everyone. :)

[Flyndaran]

Von Newman style ship? An all in one "self fabricating" vehicle.

[DemiBenson]

Way back when, I made my own take on the globular planetary-assault ship from H Beam Piper's Space Viking - held enough supplies to last 100,000 soldiers for a year, plus store all the vehicles they would use. And then I made a companion ship designed to build a city with factories and all the infrastructure those invaders would need. The companion had the same frame and most of the same systems, but swapped many of the weapons for factories, smelters, etc.

I also made a hybrid uclear-pulse rocket / magsail for sending a colony ship to another star. It used the magsail to brake, and move around at the destination and so left all that extra reaction mass behind. The write-up also had all the colony landers and fabber vehicles and asteroid miners.

I also tried a couple of Ogre-like tanks using the various add-ons. And plenty of other odd vehicles.

[Flyndaran]

I made a massive ship that was one of the very few capable of FTL that carried "drop space stations" and "drop planet colony stations". It would warp in, pop them out with crew, then zip away on a circuit around known space.
Thus leaving a few thousand people alone in a new system for a couple of years before the next visit.

[(E)]

Red Dwarf?

Ships made from a multitude of different parts, a TL12 Hull refurbished by a TL 9 culture (or lower).

Similarly a ship that started life as a miner then got refurbished as a warship then got turned into a freighter.

Ships than are made of more ships. Either all of the same type or a ship that breaks into several smaller specialist vessels.