History Main / EldritchStarship

* ''Adulthood Rites,'' the second book ''Literature/LilithsBrood'' has several chapters take place aboard the Oankali starship in orbit above post-apocalyptic Earth. The Oankali do not build tools; they grow them. Everything in the ship is alive, with its overall function somewhere between an enormous body with specialized organs and a colony for genetically engineered symbiotic organisms. Communication is handled via sensory tentacles common to all Oankali forms, allowing the ship and all its occupants to directly link their nervous systems together. This also explains how the Oankali's non-hierarchal society works: important decisions are reach via consensus, using their ship's ability to meld all their minds together.

** The ''Freespace'' fan-made expansion ''VideoGame/BluePlanet'', specifically ''War in Heaven'', ups the Eldritch factor for the Shivans. It's hard to describe ''what'' they are, exactly. Something like the physical extensions of an "algorithm" naturally emergent from the structure of spacetime[[labelnote:*]]think about prime numbers, which exist because their existence is the inevitable result of numbers being numbers and mathematics being mathematics[[/labelnote]], serving as a solution to dangerously warlike civilizations who [[OmnicidalManiac threaten the diversity of intelligent life in the universe]], i.e. destroy ''them'' before they destroy ''everything''. Their [[StandardSciFiFleet ships]] are infinitely mutable: attacking with random designs, weapons, and strategies, remembering and propagating successful permutations, and ultimately adapting themselves into the perfect weapon against the enemy they face, however long that might take -- as a natural function of the universe, the Shivans are as eternal as gravity or magnetism. Their "crews" are a myriad of creatures engaged in bizarre, periodic outbursts of violence which somehow act as a neural network that drives the ship as a whole, in reflection of the very nature of the Shivans themselves:
-->We hypothesize, as clinically as we can, that in its basal state Shivan metacognition — the system that produces their behavior and decisions — must be understood as constructively destructive, a form of thought that emerges from the constant, ruthless, self-perpetuating principle of annihilation. Whatever selective pressure, system design, or runaway process created the Shivans predicated their fundamental quiddity on the devastation of organized information in every state from the atom to the genome to the encryption of a secure combat computer to language itself.

*** The Thasians' ship in "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E2CharlieX Charlie X]]" resembles a nebulous mobile cloud of glowing green gas (in the original version); in the Remastered episode, it is similar looking, but with some kind of lighted tubes inside the gas cloud. The Thasians themselves are noncorporeal aliens who appeared to the ''Enterprise'' crew as floating, ghostly green humanoid heads.
*** Balok's starship ''Fesarius'' from "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E10TheCorbomiteManeuver The Corbomite Maneuver]]" was a gigantic starship the size of a small moon, composed of a sphere made up of smaller spheres of various sizes and colors. At least one part of this ship could break off as a smaller command vessel. It's possible that the ship was composed entirely of smaller vessels to the aforementioned one, clustered together and sharing power.
*** The Planet Killer from "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E6TheDoomsdayMachine The Doomsday Machine]]"; a giant, robotic, planet-consuming starship; it eats planets for fuel, is armored with solid neutronium and fires a pure anti-proton beam. It looks like an enormous metallic cone with a burning maw where it pulls in the rubble of planets it destroys with its weapon.

*** Q's energy grid from the [[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E1EncounterAtFarpoint pilot episode]], which folds up into a warp-capable energy sphere for the purpose of chasing the ''Enterprise''.
*** The Edo "God" orbiting Rubicun III in the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E7Justice Justice]]" appeared like a strange, ghostly space-station that was only partially materialized in normal space, and was always referred to as a dimensionally transcendent entity. At one point it sent a probe or scout (its exact nature uncertain) which resembled a ball of light that shook the entire ''Enterprise'' when it "spoke."
*** The Tarellian Plague Ship from "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E10Haven Haven]]" looks like a conventional ''Trek'' guest spaceship of the week, except that in its middle is a ring filled by a giant marble-like glowing ball of energy that is actually the ship's power source contained in a force field.
*** In its [[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS2E16QWho first appearance]], the Borg Cube is definitely one of these. It is said to be completely decentralized with no distinct command areas or engineering section. When scanned, they don't even register as possessing weapons (although this is untrue, they are quite well-armed). And when their crew of drones is all linked, the cube functions with something like a will, and sensors can't pick up the drones' individual life signs. The Borg Alcove is an UnusualUserInterface.

** ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': The synths on Coppelius remotely control giant flowers called Orchids which attach themselves to enemy vessels and drain them of power, then let them fall out of orbit and crash to the planet's surface.

* ''Anime/LostUniverse'': The "Lost Ships" are a bunch of ships made of super-advanced LostTechnology -- the BigBad Black Star fits here because of just how ''alien'' it is (with a Take Over The Universe or Kill Everybody Trying A.I. mentality) and the hero's ship "Swordbreaker" is one of these, retrieved by Kane Blueriver's grandma from places unknown and implied to have been modified greatly in order to remove the more "eldritch" parts of it (and even then, a couple of episodes' conflict occurs because of said parts acting up, doing stuff like turning all of the corridors within the ship into an ever-changing maze).

* In ''Videogame/TheDig'' there's one of these [[spoiler: as it turns out, it's the asteroid itself. Once it's activated the asteroid procedes to turn into a translucent dodecahedron]] that transports our heroes to the location were we spend the rest of the game

* ''Film/{{Lifeforce}}'': The [[OurVampiresAreDifferent space vampires]]'s spaceship utterly dwarfs the space shuttle that finds it in Halley's Comet's trail, seems to take its design cues from a vampire squid crossed with a freakish plant, and it's implied to be the GreaterScopeVillain who sent the space vampires to Earth to start a ZombieApocalypse so it could feed on humans' [[TitleDrop life force]].

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' features some curious artifacts.

[[caption-width-right:350:One gets the impression ''Film/StarTrek2009'''s production designers would have rather made a ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' movie instead...]]

** The [[Film/Dune2021 2021]] adaptation has Heighliners look like long hollow tubes, which may or may not act as portals (the director deliberately revealed as little as possible about how they function).

** In the B5 movie ''[[Recap/BabylonFiveFilm02Thirdspace Thirdspace]]'', the smaller fighters of the Thirdspace aliens look like {{Living Ship}}s similar to the ones used by the Vorlons, but their larger cruisers, glimpsed just before the interdimensional portal to Thirdspace was closed, were made up of separate parts that floated in what looked like artificial gravity fields around a big glowing ball of light.

For other Lovecraftian perversions of metallurgy, see MechanicalAbomination, with which this trope is known to overlap.

* It's no longer flying, but the derelict in ''Film/{{Alien}}'' would qualify. The ship is estimated by the crew of ''Nostromo'' to be [[TimeAbyss thousands of years old]], and looms over the already nightmarish landscape like a vast flying buttress. In sharp contrast to the StandardHumanSpaceship ''Nostromo'', with her utilitarian, industrial lines and almost dieselpunk details, the derelict seems almost organic, with its sweeping, assymetrical shape and apparently biomechanical design, seemingly including bones and other organic structures, to the point that Kane proposes that it may have been grown, not made. That, and the fact that it has been abandoned for those thousands of years, with the mangled, decayed body of the already unnerving 'Space Jockey' who flew it and seems to be a part of it. Most importantly, its deadly cargo of biological weapons in the form of leathery eggs which kicks off the rest of the film. The dark, misty ambience of LV-426 contributes to the effect. Being designed by Creator/HRGiger, one of the premier surrealist artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, also pushes it up to "Eldritch" levels. It also appears in ''Film/Prometheus''.

* It's no longer flying, but the derelict in ''Film/Alien'' would qualify. The ship is estimated by the crew of ''Nostromo'' to be [[TimeAbyss thousands of years old]], and looms over the already nightmarish landscape like a vast flying buttress. In sharp contrast to the StandardHumanSpaceship ''Nostromo'', with her utilitarian, industrial lines and almost dieselpunk details, the derelict seems almost organic, with its sweeping, assymetrical shape and apparently biomechanical design, seemingly including bones and other organic structures, to the point that Kane proposes that it may have been grown, not made. That, and the fact that it has been abandoned for those thousands of years, with the mangled, decayed body of the already unnerving 'Space Jockey' who flew it and seems to be a part of it. Most importantly, its deadly cargo of biological weapons in the form of leathery eggs which kicks off the rest of the film. The dark, misty ambience of LV-426 contributes to the effect. Being designed by Creator/HRGiger, one of the premier surrealist artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, also pushes it up to "Eldritch" levels. It also appears in ''Film/Prometheus''.

* The ''Event Horizon'' from [[Film/EventHorizon the movie of the same name]], in its mutated, EldritchAbomination form, ''definitely'' counts. A vessel warped into a tortured consciousness by exposure to a [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace hellish extradimensional realm]]. The interior design of the ship has [[{{Bizarrchitecture}} odd cybergothic architecture]], including an extremely strange "central core" and the "meat grinder corridor" leading to it, as well as numerous spikes and other elements (some of which, like the "meat grinder corridor," are handwaved as being essential to the ship's operation) that combine to make a rather terrifying aesthetic. It's definitely one of the weirdest human-designed ships on this list, even before being [[spoiler: possessed by extradimensional evil]]. It's also one of the closest examples on this list to an ISOStandardHumanSpaceship, despite being simultaneously ''this'' trope.

* ''Film/TenCloverfieldLane'': The [[AmbiguousRobots biomechanic]] alien patrol craft at the end, which acts more like a beast with armor plating than a ship.
* The [[OurVampiresAreDifferent space vampires]]'s spaceship in Creator/TobeHooper's ''Film/{{Lifeforce}}''. It utterly dwarfs the space shuttle that finds it in Halley's Comet's trail, seems to take its design cues from a vampire squid crossed with a freakish plant, and it's implied to be the GreaterScopeVillain who sent the space vampires to Earth to start a ZombieApocalypse so it could feed on humans' [[TitleDrop life force]].

* It's no longer flying, but the derelict in ''Film/Alien'' would qualify. The ship is estimated by the crew of ''Nostromo'' to be [[TimeAbyss thousands of years old]], and looms over the already nightmarish landscape like a vast flying buttress. In sharp contrast to the StandardHumanSpaceship ''Nostromo'', with her utilitarian, industrial lines and almost dieselpunk details, the derelict seems almost organich, with its sweeping, assymetrical shape and apparently biomechanical design, seemingly including bones and other organic structures, to the point that Kane proposes that it may have been grown, not made. That, and the fact that it has been abandoned for those thousands of years, with the mangled, decayed body of the already unnerving 'Space Jockey' who flew it and seems to be a part of it. Most importantly, its deadly cargo of biological weapons in the form of leathery eggs which kicks off the rest of the film. The dark, misty ambience of LV-426 contributes to the effect. Being designed by Creator/HRGiger, one of the premier surrealist artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, also pushes it up to "Eldritch" levels.

* The horseshoe-shaped alien "derelict" ship seen in ''Film/{{Alien}}'' and ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' would qualify; in addition to its apparently organic technological design, its massive pilot appears literally grown into the ship, as if merged with it in the pilot's seat. Being designed by Creator/HRGiger, one of the premier surrealist artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, also pushes it up to "Eldritch" levels.

* In ''VideoGame/GenesisRising'', pretty much all ship designs except for the Cy-Breed are this in one way or another. Humans use LivingShips with LegoGenetics, the Defiance stole human tech to make their own ships, the Cold Ones make their shiny transparent ships with ice and the Lapis carve their ships out of space asteroids.