prokopetz:

Concept: a spacefaring fantasy setting where the traditional “ship’s artificial intelligence” role is filled by synthetic hearth-gods that interface with the ship’s systems via miniaturised clockwork shrines. The tropes of ship-as-community and crew-as-found-family that pervade post-2000 spacefaring SF have direct and measurable presence in the setting, as cultivating a stronger sense of family and community results in a stronger ship’s god.

(While this practice confers considerable benefits, it also imposes a practical upper limit on the size of a ship and crew; if the ship or crew is too large, rather than a synthetic hearth-god you get a synthetic city-father, which is generally considered undesirable for non-military applications on account of the fact that those critters are scary as hell.)