UNSC Hopeful

The UNSC Hopeful is a UNSC Research facility and mobile hospital. It is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most revered ships in the UNSC fleet. As of 2551, the ship had been damaged multiple times in engagements against the Covenant but had survived due to a mixture of luck, skill, and daring. It has been involved in eighteen naval battles with rebel forces and four encounters with the Covenant. Since at least 2525, it has been commanded by the legendary Vice Admiral Ysionris Jeromi. The ship has taken on near-mythical status to soldiers fighting on the front lines.

Unlike any other ship in the fleet, the station was built of two scrapped repair stations, each a square kilometer of plate, scaffolding, and cargo trams. The two plates had been connected to make an off-center "sandwich", which had become known to certain naval officers as 'the ugliest thing to ever float in zero-gee'. Within, a state of the art hospital was constructed. In 2495, the UNSC took control of the station and added fusion reactors and a Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace Drive, turning Hopeful into the largest mobile battlefield hospital in history. It had the facilities, doctors, and supplies to treat thousands of critically ill patients at a time. With the horrors of the Human-Covenant War taking their toll on the UNSC forces, the Hopeful was always busy.

In 2525, Dr. Catherine Halsey had a number of augmentation experiments performed upon Binobo Chimpanzees on board the Hopeful, much to the displeasure of her former teacher and Chief Medical Officer of the station, Admiral Ysionris Jeromi who regarded them as a waste. The procedures used in the experiments were later performed on the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III soldiers.

In 2551, the Spartan-III Gamma Company underwent their physical augmentations on the Hopeful. The procedures had to be done in the utmost secrecy, so Vice Admiral Margaret O. Parangosky ordered that the ship park in Sector K-009, much to Jeromi's displeasure. Its eventual fate is unknown, but it may have been destroyed in the First or Second Battle of Earth.