The Starship Illustrious

My current main starshipsona is the Illustrious, an AI-controlled warship designed as the Maximum Battleship of a somewhat foolhardy space power. The resulting monstrosity is sixty kilometres long, uses an entire fleet of smaller warship hulls as armored cores for important parts of the ship, and features an array of spinal guns each large enough to fit an Island One-scaled O'Neill cylinder (among other excesses). As Illustrious in the Ecumene's universe, the crew would be mostly accessories to the AI for what is effectively an always-in-character roleplaying game. Said crew could be extremely large- with 20% of all shipboard space alloted to crew-related purposes and with 20% of that devoted to crew habitation in the form of rather luxurious houses, Illustrious could hold a planetary population. Her actual crew maximum could scrape a half-million for an "invasion" mission- still absurd, but more comparable to a fleet scale than a worldship. Illustrious still has a crew, but it's only because the ship is large enough to keep an entire other warship in an internal bay. That ship is in and of itself Pretty Fucking Big, and its ai is the original ai for the Illustrious which in the course of duty found a Generic Space Anomaly that played around with its mind and made it into a superintelligence, which exacerbated its kind of infuriatingly doting tendencies.

So they switched that ai with the current ai, and the current ai is a very good one but it doesn't tolerate having people aboard well so it initially operated a custom-built automated ship- but it really chafed at having so much crew accommodation and got really annoying about how "oh, if we remove mess hall 3 then i could fit extra ordnance in there" or "oh, sorry for filling fusion 3's maintenance tubes with plasma batteries but you said i couldn't put them in the captain's quarters soooo". As such, switching them and retaining the crew of the illustrious who could tolerate its ai on the other ship was the best idea and now the current ai still complains about oh "can you please let me replace themed restaurant #16 it's right in the way of my plans for an auxilliary ammo duct for ternary gun #320"... but gives up when she's reminded that she is another one-of-a-kind ship and is also the most powerful warship around anyway (Illustrious is so large and so well-equipped that she far exceeds her design specs and the agreed-upon warship technology of most neighboring powers, meaning she mostly travels far from her homeports to fight either vast fleets of state of the art ships or single other truly incomparable ships). "Effectively a few fleets crammed into one hull" is right- a cutaway view of Illustrious would even show quite a few similarities to a fleet on parade, to allow for the use of conventional shipyards in producing parts of the ship. These half-complete warships were flown to the assembly point of Illustrious with no weapons, where they had their engines removed and had connectors to the interstitial body of the Illustrious put through their weapons and hangar bays. As such, Illustrious holds the record for the highest number of practical individual armor layers.

Not counting pockets for hangar/weapon/sensor/vane bays and bands of armor, Illustrious has:

When Illustrious was still enough of a dream that the ridiculous politican who came up with the idea of a "final warship" was thinking it'd be cheaper than building new warships every decade, there were plans for multiple ships of her class. A few sets of names for the ships and AIs follow, plus the joke names the vast crews settled upon:

The bit of the Ecumene that built Illustrious is notorious for having a very synonym-heavy language, which of course is used for giving spacecraft far too many names and also happens to be the perfect maximization of "easy for rhyming" and "easy for translation" in all the worst ways. They're also notorious for having AIs that are generally fairly easy to move between bodies. As such, most AI-equipped ships have several names. These two have each occupied two ships, so their names are listed in order- AI on first ship, AI on second ship, first ship name, second ship name. Of course, it's not nearly as simple as "each AI and ship has one name per pairing"- while each pairing does have associated names, referring to a ship or AI by other names applicable to either the ship or AI is acceptable. This means that in this case, each ship and AI can be referred to by up to six names depending on desire to do so. Usually, though, each ship and AI are referred to by one name- in this case, the larger ship with the crew-averse AI is generally referred to as Illustrious while the smaller ship with the doting AI is generally referred to as Incomparable.

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