bio ships

I have been pondering the concept of bio engined space ships . The one we used in a super hero game was free thinking being . The bio ship was created to be a scout craft . It was well armed for self defense but disliked combat . I will not bored everyone will recounting each adventure .

Here are a few thoughts about bio ship

Advances
Self repairing , cheaper and faster to build , telepathy with crew with in the ship or close by

Downside
The ship can get sick like you and me . will need special diet needs , repair time is longer then mechancail ship and ship has dislike of planet , other ships or races

Other factors
the ship has it own mind , so it may not want to go somewhere or refused to follows orders

The ship need to take a vacation every couple of years

What examples of bioships do we have?

There was farscape and from Voyager and one from TNG. Any others that I missed?

Taking a composite of the sources should be able to come up with a good bioship. Hrm, a bioship template anyone?

Well there are actually two bioship examples within Coda: The Species 8472 Bioship, and the 'Gomtu' Ship, from 'Tin man' (one of my fave TNG episodes) sadly while both of those represent your telepathic and regenerative elements, they were nigh on god ships, in terms of power and potency: But it's a good place to start if nothing else! The Breen were rumoured to have organic ship technology but the reality turned out to be far more ordinary (if cool looking all the same!)

It's up to you if you want to give it organic or machine based stats (as done in Aliens for Gomtu) or ship type stats (as done for the bioship in Starships).

You could design it like Moya, in Farscape, because then it's less powerful. The Pilot-Moya symbiosis are quite a cool story element, rather than just making it 'telepathic' have it speak through it's pilot. Or maybe you could go down the route of something like Andromeda and have it create an avatar of it's self, which interacts with the crew (only it's not an AI, it's alive)

Actually if you were running in the Margaret Weis system (for Firefly and BSG) they actually design their ships using the same basic design template as characters, so that would have made the transition quite simple!

Coming up with ideas on how to base it is not without examples within Scifi, far from it, but designing it in the game system, could be tricky, and will depend on the system you choose!