Star Fox franchise strategy guide/Vehicles/Great Fox

The Great Fox (グレートフォックス) is a fictional space aircraft carrier / battleship used in the Star Fox series of video games as the mothership of the Star Fox team. It was officially introduced in Star Fox 64 as the base of operations of the team when in space.

According to the Star Fox 64 Player's guide, James McCloud placed the order to Space Dynamics to build the original Great Fox, which is described as a Dreadnought-Class space battleship. The ship was not cheap, as James had to take out an eighty-year loan. Unfortunately, James disappeared at Venom before completion.

Mothership in Star Fox 2
The idea of Star Fox having a mothership was started in the unreleased Star Fox 2. The mothership, though nameless, slightly resembled the Great Fox, though there are glaringly obvious differences such as the side-mounted docking bays.

Great Fox in Star Fox 64
The Great Fox is relatively new at the time of its official debut in Star Fox 64. The primary purpose of the ship is that of a carrier and repair facility for the team’s Arwings. In addition, it also acts in a logistical capacity when needed to transfer supplies to the combat zone. The ship also possesses weapon systems in the form of two powerful laser cannons that can fire in a limited arc ahead of it, and are powerful enough to blow apart asteroids and seriously damage the massive battleships that guard the Area 6 access corridor to Venom.

In addition, the vessel can survive in a variety of environments. The Great Fox is able to enter a planetary atmosphere and even land at a planet-side spaceport. Furthermore, it has a limited aquatic capability as shown during the mission to Aquas where it is seen drifting half-submerged in the ocean to deploy the Blue Marine.

Despite its tendency to stay on the sidelines and support the team when it can, the Great Fox has come under direct attack. During the battle in Sector Z, the ship comes under threat from a volley of Venom missiles. Failure to intercept and destroy these missiles results in the Great Fox having one of its four wings destroyed, crippling it and rendering it unable to provide cover-fire in the following difficult stage.

Note that during that same battle, the Great Fox acts as a quick-repair station in the heat of battle. If a player aligns his Arwing with the rear docking bay of the ship, the Arwing will fly in and subsequently fly out the frontal, lower docking bay, with both wings and shields fully repaired. The Great Fox is 890 sm in length.

Perhaps the only weakness of the vessel is the firing arc of its laser cannons. The Great Fox cannot fire from its side or from behind, making the ship vulnerable to attack in these areas. This is manifested in the Sector Z level, in which the ship's cannons cannot hit the oncoming missiles as they are coming from the side, and in the beginning cut scene of the Meteo level, when one of the asteroids hits one of the Great Fox's wings (this hardly does any damage to the ship however).

Great Fox in Star Fox Adventures
In Star Fox Adventures, the Great Fox is mostly seen from the inside, serving as somewhat of a home base for the team members. It has fallen into a state of disrepair in recent years due to insufficient funds by the team, and its exterior armor has begun to deteriorate. The power of the engines have also decreased considerably, and the ship is only able to drift, producing a ring of flames from its boosters as it does so. The weapons are never seen firing in the game, although it's possible that they don't work as they were not being used against Andross in the final battle above the planet Sauria where the Great Fox is orbiting.

Great Fox in Star Fox: Assault
In Star Fox: Assault, the team used the money received from the Sauria mission to overhaul the Great Fox into a much sleeker looking ship, inside and out. It is now equipped with a long-range transfer system that can send down Arwings and Landmasters when needed. However, during the final battle over the Aparoid Homeworld, the Great Fox becomes infected by the Aparoids(Peppy notifies you during Misson 9), showing the weakness of the ship, by not having weapons on the sides or the back of the ship, making these areas easy targets for the Aparoids, as they cling to these areas so that the ship's front cannons cannot attack them. It is soon destroyed when Peppy Hare heroically sacrifices the ship (and nearly himself in the process) to destroy the anti-laser shield blocking the main entrance to the Homeworld Core. It is then shown that the bridge is intact, as it seemingly has an escape pod function. The Great Fox is also one of the multiplayer stages, only allowing players to fly outside it for air battles.

Great Fox in Star Fox Command
In Star Fox Command, the Star Fox team has to get a new mothership after the Great Fox was destroyed in Assault. However, the new ship looks totally different from the Great Fox's past models, resembling more of a space-faring aircraft carrier than a battle-cruiser. It is also significantly weaker in terms of defense than the original Great Fox. The original Great Fox could survive a missile and come out with only one wing destroyed, while the new one can't even withstand an assault by even the weakest of enemies, this could possibly be because of this ship being much less expensive than its predecessors. But its redeeming quality is the ability to carry up to three missiles which can be used to attack clusters of enemies from afar rather than attack them directly with a pilot.

Appearance in other games
The ship was also featured in the Super Smash Bros. series as an arena. In Super Smash Bros., the Star Fox 64 stage Sector Z is featured as a stage where the Great Fox acts as the platform on which the players fight each other. The players can only traverse the ship length-wise. In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the Great Fox is greatly reduced to a smaller, unrealistic size (however if the game mode is "Tiny Melee", where all characters are smaller the characters are roughly to scale to the ship). It is featured on two stages; In the Corneria level, the Great Fox acts as a platform as in Super Smash Bros. (while it flies over the planet Corneria from Star Fox 64), while in the Venom level, the player traverses the ship width-wise as it flies over the planet Venom from Star Fox 64. It also briefly appears in boths place's introductions, in Melee shown along with the Blue Falcon and Samus Aran's Starship while in SSB, it is shown very briefly before the camera zooms into the bridge to show Fox. The ship is also a trophy in the game. In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the trailer revealed at the Nintendo World Tour on November 3rd, 2006 revealed a new Star Fox stage, with the fighting taking place atop a new space craft called the Pleiades which flies through the atmosphere of Corneria, through an asteroid belt and a space battle, along with the original Great Fox flying in the background in the middle of a dogfight between Star Fox's Arwings and Star Wolf's Wolfens (also of their Star Fox 64 incarnations). In Super Smash Bros. Melee, its trophy claimed it first appeared in the original Star Fox for the SNES, but it was incorrect, because it officially first appeared in Star Fox 64 for the Nintendo 64.