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' although many soldiers whom Kurt-051 spoke to and had been in the Hopeful describe her as 'As the most beautiful thing ever to be seen'. Within, a state of the art hospital was constructed. In 2495, the UNSC took control of the station and added six 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 many cases, the Hopeful was known to literally bring the dead back to life.

In 2525, Dr. Catherine Halsey messaged her former instructor Admiral Ysionris Jeromi about a set of hypothetical augmentation experiments performed upon Bonobo Chimpanzees concerning Dr. Halsey's upcoming SPARTAN-II Augmentations aboard the Hopeful, much to the displeasure Admiral Jeromi at the thought of such an experiment. The data presented to Dr. Halsey by the admiral was used by Halsey in the augmentations 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. Hopeful's eventual fate is unknown, but it may have been destroyed in the Battle of Earth.