History Main / PlanetSpaceship

* ''Anime/{{Doraemon}}'':

* [[https://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_ship_moves The Ship Moves]] is a fanfic based on TabletopGame/Warhammer40000 where the God-Emperor awakens and orders the construction of a starship 1 AU in length, with otherwise unusual assistance of species outside of humanity to handle the impossible requirements to make this work, so that they may abandon the Milky Way and head toward a destination only the God-Captain knows.

* ''[[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_ship_moves The Ship Moves]]'' (Or ''Warhammer 50,000: Age of Exodus''), a variation setting based off of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' crafted on the /tg/ board of Website/FourChan.

** A number of Precursor races created World Ships, vessels so big that they had to be constructed as spheres to keep them from being crushed by their own gravity.

There's big spaceships, there's ''[[MileLongShip gigantic]]'' spaceships, and then there's these: a spaceship (or station) that's as big as a small planet or large moon. In space, you have no external gravity to contend with, so it's possible to build some truly humongous structures like this. Alternatively, you may just want to strap some engines onto an ''actual'' planet or moon and set off, although this may require [[ClarkesThirdLaw Sufficiently Advanced Technology]]. If the ship's big enough, it may even have its natural gravity be big enough to keep things rooted to its surface, though usually not enough to make an earth-like atmosphere (like, say, our moon).

Often used for RuleOfCool, in which case it will overlap with CoolStarship, the Planet Spaceship is a great way to intimidate your foe, or to pack your entire population off when your home world is in trouble. May evoke a "ThatsNoMoon" reaction when it first appears.

* Alpha from ''Film/ValerianAndTheCityOfAThousandPlanets''. It started as our world's ISS, then other nations of the world expanded it with their own vessels, then alien vessels from all over the universe expanded it further. It size and mass started causing a serious problem to Earth and thus Alpha was freed from its orbit.
* The Chinese film ''Film/TheWanderingEarth'' is focused around a human effort to move the Earth from our Solar System to Alpha Centauri to avoid the Sun going red giant within the span of centuries instead of billions of years. As the process of moving away from the Sun freezes most of the planet's surface, humans mostly live in underground cities close to the giant engines pushing the planet.

* V'Ger from ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'':
** It was 82 astronomical units, making it the size of the solar system.
** The DirectorsCut changes it to 2 [=AU=] which is still twice the distance from Earth to the sun.
** It later turns out this was mostly a cloud surrounding it, with the physical ship being 48 miles long according to DeletedScenes and the novelization, making it more of a MileLongShip.

* The Access Ark in ''VideoGame/KirbyPlanetRobobot'' looks to be nearly as big as Popstar itself in the opening cinematic and on the world map. It's the mothership of the Haltmann Works Company and is used to mechanize and invade planets before stripping them of their resources, [[spoiler:though its true nature ends up being quite a surprise]].

* In ''Literature/KnownSpace'', the Pierson's Puppeteers are a race of cowards, and the only Puppeteers humans have met are insane -- because no sane Puppeteer would trust his life to something so fragile as a spaceship. So when they discover a massive wave of radiation approaching their home system, they leave it behind... but take their planets with them. They put them in orbit around each other (see [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette Klemperer Rosette]] on Website/TheOtherWiki) and accelerated them to just under lightspeed, heading out of the galaxy. Because humans have faster than light starships (which Puppeteers are too afraid to use), they expect humans to greet them at their destination, the Clouds of Magellan.

* The Pierson's Puppeteers of Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'' have solved the problem of heat pollution by removing five planets from orbit, putting them in a rosette pattern, and flinging them into the depths of space, couting on their heat pollution to keep them warm enough to be liveable.

* ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'' has The Death Egg, a parody of the Death Star. The intro of ''Sonic & Knuckles'' illustrates just how big it is--the Eggman face fills the top of a volcano (Lava Reef, to be exact).

[[folder:Other]]
* The closest RealLife equivalent to the fictional examples for this trope are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet rogue planets,]] which roam free across interstellar space, be they bodies that formed the same way stars do or planets ejected from a star system. Since we can detect just the largest and youngest ones, it's perfectly conceivable that there'd be ''a lot'' of them out there, down to Earth-sized ones or less.
* Sometimes people call Earth a "living space-ship" considering it's fit for human habitation, though it could be considered more of a space station since it orbits the Sun.
[[/folder]]

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'':

* ''Animation/TimeMasters'' ends on a planet sized SpaceStation divided into two hemispheres.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV: Endwalker'' reveals at the halfway point of its story campaign that [[spoiler:Hydaelyn's moon is not only a prison for cotaining Zodiark, but an enormous spacecraft designed for ferrying the inhabitants of the planet to a new home in the event of [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt the Final Days]], with a race of benevolent MoonRabbit[=s=] operating it and constructing habitats to house an entire planet's worth of refugees. Thankfully, by the end of the story, the need to use the moon to escape a dying world passes.]]

->"''...Brave as fools and bold as gods, they built an armada of swift little ships and raced out to meet me, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that I was enormous- bigger than worlds, massive and enduring, and in their spellbound eyes, beautiful.''"
-->-- The ''Literature/GreatShip''

There's big spaceships, there's ''[[MileLongShip gigantic]]'' spaceships, and then there's these: a space ship (or station) that's as big as a small planet or large moon. In space, you have no external gravity to contend with, so it's possible to build some truly humongous structures like this. Alternatively, you may just want to strap some engines onto an ''actual'' planet or moon and set off, although this may require SufficientlyAdvancedTechnology. If the ship's big enough, it may even have its natural gravity be big enough to keep things rooted to its surface, though usually not enough to make an earth-like atmosphere (like, say, our moon).

Technically, actual planets and moons ''are'' spacecraft in the sense that they are in orbit around something. Buckminster Fuller made this analogy when he referred to "Space Ship Earth." But to qualify for this trope, the super-colossal spacecraft must have some means of ''propulsion'', or at the very least orbital correction.

Subtrope of MileLongShip and PlanetaryRelocation. May be used as a BigDumbObject, TheBattlestar, or a GenerationShip. Commonly, though not exclusively, found in SpaceOpera. Compare DysonSphere and RingWorldPlanet. See also: UnnecessarilyLargeVessel, UnnecessarilyLargeInterior and AwesomeButImpractical.

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[[folder:Film — Live Action]]

* In ''Literature/TheCityAndTheStars'' by Creator/ArthurCClarke, it is revealed at the end that [[spoiler:most of humanity left the Galaxy to explore the universe... in a star cluster made into a fleet.]]
* The Polish sci-fi novel for teenagers ''Ci z dziesiątego tysiąca'' (''Ones from the Tenth Thousand'') by Jerzy Broszkiewicz mostly takes place on a "mechanoplanet": a large, intelligent spherical spaceship with artificial environment.

* The larger models of Culture General Systems Vehicle from Creator/IainBanks' ''Literature/TheCulture'' fall here. The things can be anywhere from [[MileLongShip 25]] to 200 kilometres in size, carry ''billions'' of passengers, and can match entire multi-planet empires for manufacturing capacity and raw power generation. One scene shows kilometre-long oceangoing ships being packed away for storage ''inside'' a GSV.
** Perhaps even more impressive, the Culture incorporates ''hundreds of thousands'' of [=GSVs=] by the later Culture novels.
* Creator/DavidWeber's ''Literature/EmpireFromTheAshes'' series has ''Dahak'' and all the other Imperial Planetoids. ''Dahak'' has spent the last 50,000 years pretending to be Earth's Moon... and it's the smallest of them. They come equipped with hundred-kilometer-thick armor and carry 80,000-ton battleships as parasite craft.
* In ''[[Literature/{{Skyward}} Evershore]]'', it's revealed that [[spoiler:the planet of Detritus (where most of the series has been set) is capable of interstellar travel, being fitted with mechanisms to allow it to be teleported by a cytonic and with special gravity dampeners to minimize the stress on planets it teleports too close to.]]
* In Creator/JohnVarley's ''Literature/GaeaTrilogy'', Gaea and her brood are [[LivingShip living space habitats]] large enough to be mistaken for additional moons of Saturn.
** Varley also uses this trope in his short story "The Funhouse Effect": a large comet in a close solar orbit is partially hollowed out, has engines mounted on it and is being used for exclusive pleasure cruises 'round the Sun.
* Creator/CordwainerSmith gives us ''The Golden Ship'' - a sphere 90 million miles in length (just 2 million miles short of an AU). That's approximately 100 times larger than Earth's sun! Extremely fast, it could move in seconds. [[spoiler:However, the Golden Ship is really a decoy, being mostly hollow and consisting of foam and wires. It has no weapons of its own, and must rely on its speed to survive.]]
* In the ''Literature/{{Gor}}'' series:
** The planet Gor itself can be considered an example, since the Priest-Kings (the PhysicalGods of the planet) moved it to its current location 5 million years ago.

* In Creator/RobertReed's ''Literature/GreatShip'' series, the Great Ship itself is an [[BigDumbObject ancient abandoned artifact]] which was claimed and settled by mankind's descendants. It is larger than Jupiter. The interior of the ship has [[StarshipLuxurious hundreds of thousands of enormous caverns which are inhabited by the passengers]]. The ship has fourteen gimbaled engines on one end, which are fed from dozens of hydrogen fuel tanks whose individual volume exceeds that of all the Earth's oceans combined by several orders of magnitude. In ''The Well of Stars'', a planet ''weapon'' is shown - the Sword of Creation - a planet-wide [[MadeOfIron hyperfiber]] ring which has microscopic black holes tethered to its rim, which is then spun up and repeatedly launched at planets to expose a path to its core for mining.

* In Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'' series, the Pierson's Puppeteers are a race of cowards, and the only Puppeteers humans have met are insane-- because no sane Puppeteer would trust his life to something so fragile as a spaceship. So when they discover a massive wave of radiation approaching their home system, they leave it behind... but take their planets with them. They put them in orbit around each other (see [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette Klemperer Rosette]] on Website/TheOtherWiki) and accelerated them to just under lightspeed, heading out of the galaxy. Because humans have faster than light starships (which Puppeteers are too afraid to use), they expect humans to greet them at their destination, the Clouds of Magellan.
* In Smith's ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series, armed planets with inertialess drives are slow (by Lensman standards - they can still travel much faster than light), but can mount much heavier weapons and shields than any built ship.
* In ''Los Altísimos'', by the Chilean writer Hugo Correa, Cronn is a planet of 33,000 kilometers in diameter inhabited by [[HumanAliens the Cronnios]], which in reality are several planets hollow one inside the other, with oceans on both sides and floating continents. It is really a construction made by aliens that reach the level of EldritchAbomination, so that the Cronnios inhabit it and can explore the galaxy and inform their discoveries to Los Altísimos.

* In the Creator/PiersAnthony book ''Macroscope'', SufficientlyAdvancedTechnology allows four humans to turn the entire planet Neptune into a machine that can carry them to different locations in space instantly, [[Literature/AWrinkleInTime tesseract-style]].

* When the aliens of Creator/GregEgan's ''Literature/{{Orthogonal}}'' trilogy develop their [[spoiler:PerpetualMotionMachine engines that are powered by light and consume (almost) no fuel]], some characters discuss building massive engines on the [[DoomedHometown Doomed Home Planet]] and "flying" the planet to safety like a straightforward PlanetSpaceship. At/after the end of the trilogy, though, [[spoiler:they instead ''put out the sun'' and build engines ''on its surface'', so that they can move it and let its gravity take care of pulling the planet along, which will cause fewer seismic disturbances on the planet. This is at least partially justified in that, InUniverse, the sun actually ''is'' just a big ball of flammable rock that is on fire, not a ball of gas undergoing a continuous fusion reaction.]]

* The largest vessels in the ''Literature/PerryRhodan'' series fall under this trope. For instance the cosmocratic spore ships, spheres with a size of 1126 kilometers.
** Possibly the most extreme examples: Klongheim and Parsfon, the fully FTL-capable homes of rival robot civilizations traveling the universe in search of their rightful masters, with dimensions measured in light-months. It's strongly suggested that these got their start as remnants of some cosmic disaster or other that weren't so much built as colonized.
* In ''Primordial Threat'' a black hole is about the pass through the solar system, destroying Earth in the process. A scientist identified the threat well before anyone else and managed to develop a technology that allows the Earth and Moon to cross interstellar space to settle in orbit of a new star.

* In Creator/EEDocSmith's ''Literature/SkylarkSeries'', Drs. Seaton and Crane build a 1000km diameter spaceship called the ''Skylark of Valeron''. Its size was needed to house the sensors required to travel at its full velocity. Later, their rival Dr. [=DuQuesne=] builds an even bigger ship.

* In ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':

* ''Literature/TerreEnFuite'' (''Fleeing Earth'') is a novel by François Bordes where Earth (with the Moon in natural gravitational tow) and Venus are turned into giant spaceships in order to allow humanity to escape the Sun going nova. Initially, the plan is to wait out the explosion behind Jupiter and come back. However, scientist then determine that the Sun will not return to its former state, so they have to move the planets to another system... and then again when the first one turns out to have a LostColony of humans.

* In another Stephen Baxter series, the Manifold trilogy, the Red Moon was built by the Downstreamers and programmed to teleport itself from universe to universe, abducting and dropping off various hominids from alternate Earths in order to advance human evolution.
* ''Literature/TwentyThreeTwelve'': In a small-scale example, many of the orbiting habitats in the ColonizedSolarSystem are "terraria"; a planetoid or large asteroid hollowed out, set spinning to provide centrifugal gravity, and populated with an ecosystem of plants and animals. Water, atmosphere, and soil are derived from the asteroid's original material or brought in from other bodies, and an artificial "sunline" along the axis of rotation provides light for the plants. Main character Swan mentions a period of her career that was spent designing biospheres for various habitats.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' has The Death Egg, a parody of the Death Star. The intro of ''Sonic & Knuckles'' illustrates just how big it is--the Eggman face fills the top of a volcano (Lava Reef, to be exact).

* Downplayed in ''VideoGame/SpaceTyrant.'' The Hoplites (a ProudWarriorRace of [[spoiler:humanoid rabbits]]) utilize asteroids to build their ships out of, by hollowing them out and adding computers, comms, engines, and guns. Small ships use small spacerocks, big ships use bigger (or even multiple, as is the case with Cruisers and Battleships) spacerocks. Except for their Destroyers, which mostly use purpose-built hulls (constructed from yellow jade, of all things).
* The Gigastructural Engineering mod for ''{{VideoGame/Stellaris}}'' allows one to convert moons into starships... for starters. Later, you can convert barren planets as well, build megastructures that churn out higher quality moon-sized ships (for which you need to reprocess entire planets into materials), and finally, combine half a dozen moons and about as many planets into a huge ship. Then you need to select the planet that would contribute the billions of people required to crew it.

* ''VideoGame/XComEnemyUnknown'' has the alien Temple Ship, which is roughly a size of Greenland. Bonus points for its gravitational pull causing earthquakes when it arrives.

* In ''Film/TransformersTheLastKnight'', Quintessa has converted the remains of Cybertron into one that's slightly larger than The Moon and flown it to Earth. Earth itself is revealed to be the gigantic transformer, Unicron.