History Main / EldritchStarship

* ''BattlestarGalactica'':

** The Ship of Lights from the [[BattlestarGalactica original series]] was another dimensionally transcendent craft shaped like a giant flying city that moved faster than anything the colonials flew, and sent out "ball-of-glowing-light" probes similar to other examples on this list, which had a habit of emitting a loud noise (presumably over radio channels) which humans couldn't tolerate, and also a habit of making Viper pilots disappear on patrol. Inside it resembled a techno-heaven, full of ascended beings, draped entirely in white.

* In the movie ''Explorers'', the kids build a spaceship based around a force field bubble, similar to the above.

* The [[{{Precursors}} Heechee]] ships in Frederik Pohl's ''HeecheeSaga'' have FTL technology that baffles human understanding and so can only be sent on pre-programmed journeys. Most of them don't return, and some that do return come back with their crews killed in various horrifying ways. They're also designed for nonhumanoids to operate, meaning that while humans can tolerate living inside one for several weeks or months, it's not very comfortable, and supplies and free space are at a premium. Human explorers found a cache of them on Venus, which led to another cache being discovered on an asteroid called "Gateway."

The polar opposite of ISOStandardHumanSpaceship, these are spacecraft, time machines, and/or interdimensional vehicles whose weirdness goes beyond LivingShip and possibly into AlienGeometries or a mobile version of the EldritchLocation. We call it EldritchStarship because these vehicles are usually either starships or interdimensional or time traveling starships. It's rare (but not unheard of) for examples of this trope to be incapable of either space travel or FasterThanLightTravel. The milder form of this usually begins with BiggerOnTheInside or dimensionally transcendent in some way other than bog-standard FasterThanLightTravel, and it only grows weirder from that point on. May involve BodyHorror or invoke elements of CosmicHorror. They might be constructed from unconventional materials, powered by unconventional power sources, be [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence dimensionally transcendent]], or have an UnusualUserInterface. [[{{Bizarrchitecture}} Their interiors may even look like they were designed by MCEscher]]. There's no guarantee that the crew or the ship itself won't change its interiors (or even its exterior) from time to time. Frequently they are a GeniusLoci or function as a SettingAsACharacter. They are ''always'' surreal in some way that a typical spaceship in fiction just isn't.

*** Later Cubes and other Borg ships in ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' and ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' display a more centralized internal appearance and distribution of functions, with talk of "central plexes" and other terms that contradicted the ships' original on-screen depiction.

* In {{Genseshaft}}, alien constructs called 'rings' appear in space. From a distance they look like giant golden wedding rings, but this is just a protective barrier of quantum coherent matter. Underneath they are made of a gray material that is like smooth stone, but it 'seems organic' to the astronauts landing on it.

** The Pathfinders' ship appeared to dematerialize and rematerialize while traveling through wormholes. What we saw of its interior, when it was merged with Moya, was quite unusual, stark and minimalistic. It had unusual capabilities related to its Phaztillon generator, such as turning members of its crew invisible (though this exposed them to fatal radiation), and the entire ship was also a giant computer.
** Biomechanoid technology in general, with its many biological quirks like pregnancy and sickness. Moya, a LivingShip, even had SteamPunk elements such as Pilot's controls and the air cycling room. She also had two means of FTL: Hetch Drive, which is basically warp speed, plus Starburst, a defense mechanism where the ship entered an interdimensional rift and rode an energy wave to a random destination. The series featured other members of her species of {{Living Ship}}s, one of which had gone senile, another was diseased, and yet another had gone insane.

* ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' loves this trope:

** ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' loves this trope:

* ''Fracnhise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse'':

* An extradimensional alien research vessel in the ''Series/{{Farscape}}'' episode "My Three Crichtons" resembled an energy globe that expanded into a solid (well, solid-appearing) glowing green sphere with hints of alien movement inside.

* An episode of ''RedDwarf'' called ''Holo Ship'', had just that: an entire ship and crew made of holograms. This is where Rimmer got his hard light drive, allowing him to solidify.

* The ''Event Horizon'' from [[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]]. It should be noted though that the interior design of the ship, with its [[{{Bizarrchitecture}} odd cybergothic architecture, including its extremely strange "central core" and the "meat grinder corridor" leading to it, as well as the numerous spikes and other elements of its rather terrifying aesthetic]] (some of which, like the "meat grinder corridor," are handwaved as being essential to the ship's operation). 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.

** The ships of the First Ones were mostly just very advanced looking spacecraft, and some or most of them may have been {{Living Ship}}s, but one was stated in supplementary materials to have been [[http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=JjL&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1352&bih=582&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=GQUenI21ifQC2M:&imgrefurl=http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/361801&docid=rztEl7LYSHsQDM&imgurl=http://www.isnnews.net/hyperspace/first/first-2_lg1.jpg&w=640&h=600&ei=vkXqT7LWC5Pk6QGem-jWAQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=884&vpy=130&dur=523&hovh=217&hovw=232&tx=156&ty=127&sig=108509448540324554612&page=1&tbnh=118&tbnw=119&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:0,i:89 ''the core of an Earth-like planet, mined out and re-engineered for interplanetary travel'']], with smaller, unattached segments orbiting in a ring-like field of artificial gravity.

** The ships of the First Ones were mostly just very advanced looking spacecraft, and some or most of them may have been {{Living Ship}}s, but one was stated in supplementary materials to have been ''the core of an Earth-like planet, mined out and re-engineered for interplanetary travel'', with smaller, unattached segments orbiting in a ring-like field of artificial gravity.

* The Anti-Spirals of ''TengenToppaGurrenLagann'' utilize very odd kinds of ships. In-universe, their strangeness was due largely to the fact that they didn't have faces, but they were designed quite oddly regardless.

* Practically a RunningGag in ''TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''.

* ''StarTrekExpandedUniverse'':

** Also from the ''StarTrekExpandedUniverse'', there are the [[http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Cosmozoan Cosmozoa]], fully living, sometimes sentient space-dwelling creatures such as the [[http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Crystalline_Entity crystalline entity]], and various other SpaceWhale-like lifeforms, like the species that "Mother" and "Junior" from "Galaxy's Child", and at least two species of LivingShip, both capable (though to different degrees) of shapeshifting in order to rearrange their internal structure (and in the case of the Farpoint Entity, its external structure as well) to resemble spacecraft rather than their natural [[http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Star-jellies Jellyfish-like form]]. The other LivingShip example, Gomtuu, was basically a SpaceWhale-like sentient entity that could alter its interior for different forms of life. Though structurally they are largely conventional, some, perhaps most notably the "[[http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Star-jellies star jellies]]", have remarkable shapeshifting abilities, changing external shape and "growing" corridors, control rooms, and other facilities as the need arises.

* ''DoctorWho'':

* An extradimensional alien research vessel in the ''{{Farscape}}'' episode "My Three Crichtons" resembled an energy globe that expanded into a solid (well, solid-appearing) glowing green sphere with hints of alien movement inside.

* ''BabylonFive'':

* ''{{Fringe}}'': [[TearJerker In "White Tulip,"]] [[OurTimeTravelIsDifferent Alister Peck built a time machine which included a Faraday Cage as part of its design...]] [[BodyHorror into his]] [[{{Cyborg}} own flesh]].

* The Zarn's spaceship from "LandOfTheLost" resembled an invisible shape like a dirigible (or a tennis shoe) covered in a grid of white lights. Inside is similar, with long, dark featureless void-like halls and rooms. Its pilot, the Zarn, also looks similar, being invisible except for a grid of bright lights shaped like a humanoid. Whether this means the ship is made out of the same basic material as its pilot or whether the similarity is only superficial is not clear.

* ''{{Warhammer40k}}'':

** In the ''Rogue Trader'' RPG, one of the ship upgrades is the Tenebro Maze, which turns the interior of the ship into a complex maze of hidden trap doors and secret passages, which not only hinders any would-be boarders, but also makes targeting specific systems of the ship veyr difficult as the components aren't where they should be in a typical ship.

* In ''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

* Thank to reality warping technologies, all spaceships are a ''little'' weird in the ''[=Literature/{{Uplift}}=]'' series. Even those species that don't care for the technology need to employ a means of defense. Those who enjoy the technology get ''really'' weird. Everything is, at the core, the same design. However, everybody has their own variants, depending on their design philosophy and most especially their liking for probability technology. Some species' ships are pretty much ISO Standard. Others, like the maniac Tandu, have ships are "Lobster Spaceship"- style bizarre spidery things, and probably have their hull alloys or even their [[ChaosArchitecture configuration]] altered all the time due to the all the ill-shielded probability tech in their drives and weapons.

** The [[http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cd3240ea58a MPA]]'s [[http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/467b32ffab277 Leviathan Class Dreadnought]], which morphs from a thin cylinder into an ovoid.

* V'Ger from ''StarTrekTheMotionPicture'': an enormous, self-aware machine that literally absorbs ships, space stations, entire planets and even spatial phenomenon and stores them inside its complex memory, and is surrounded by an energy cloud that is 2 Astronomical Units across (or [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale 82 AUs]], depending on which version of the movie you watch).

* The "Whale Probe" in ''StarTrekIVTheVoyageHome'': an unmanned, gigantic textured cylinder with a smaller spherical section held in an energy beam. Comes to 23rd Century Earth and sends a communications signal that threatens to destroy Earth's environment until it's finally able to talk to two [[TimeTravel temporally-displaced]] Humpback Whales. It's implied that an intelligent Cetacean species built the Probe.

** In the William Shatner "Shatnerverse" ''StarTrek'' novel "The Return," Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher explore a Borg hypercube (tesseract) space station that is dimensionally transcendent.

* Various ''StarTrek'' series:
** The Edo "God" orbiting Rubicun III in the ''StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "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 Shop from "Haven": It looks like a conventional ''StarTrek'' 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.

*** Later Cubes and other Borg ships in ''StarTrekFirstContact'' and ''StarTrekVoyager'' display a more centralized internal appearance and distribution of functions, with talk of "central plexes" and other terms that contradicted the ships' original on-screen depiction.
** ''StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'': Founders, or at least Laas (a "lost" Changeling like Odo, who grew up among an obscure humanoid race), can shapeshift into living starships capable of warp speeds.
** ''StarTrekVoyager'': The crew encountered a "photonic lattice" in one episode which was theorized to be the equivalent of a spacecraft for photonic life forms.

** Time travel pods discovered by the ''NX-01'' crew in ''StarTrekEnterprise'' were bigger on the inside than on the outside.
** The Xyrillians piloted an ambiguous case of a LivingShip (it looked organic but it was never made clear if the exterior was bio-engineered or just designed to look that way), however, its interior was... something else of, of a surreal quality never seen before in a ''StarTrek'' spaceship. It had grass-covered floors, food growing from the walls, and the ship was filled with aquarium-like chambers containing edible aquatic creatures. The episode in which this ship appeared focused on some of the details of First Contact usually ignored by ''StarTrek'', and featured a human character having to adjust to a slightly different atmosphere and pressure than he was used to while he worked aboard the alien ship to help the aliens fix their warp drive. To emphasize the alien nature of the environment, the lighting and camera angles used to film the interior were also quite unusual. The result was a spaceship with a suitably alien environment quite unlike the ISO Standard Rubber Forehead Spaceships usually favored by the series.
** In ''StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'', the Thasians' ship in "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.