Knight Ship

This article is about a character or concept that lacks a name, but has an official term or designation. For more information, see Help:Nameless.

The Knight Ship is a spacecraft from the movie continuity family.

Sir, I'm afraid you can't park that vehicle here! Damn tourist.

Every interstellar bounty hunter worth their salt needs a cool spaceship to store their various captives and trophies, and Lockdown is no exception. He travels the galaxy in the "Knight Ship", a massive cruiser filled to the brim with all kinds of exotic weapons, alien captives, and nightmarish creatures employed by Lockdown to keep order aboard his vessel. As a result, even other Cybertronians are wary about trying to break in. Therefore, getting back out of his ship alive is an even harder feat to pull off. In short, few of the captives onboard have managed to outmaneuver Lockdown, and even fewer have escaped the ship's jails.^[1]

Deep within this craft is the Knights' Temenos; once a sanctum of reverence, it has since become the holding quarters of the rarest and worst of Lockdown's quarry.

Fiction

Movies

Age of Extinction film

The Knight Ship originally belonged to a group of mythical knights who travelled the galaxy in it. At some point, Lockdown gained possession of the ship, and modified it to serve as a flying prison for his various hunts. Among the ship's prisoners were a group of legendary Cybertronian warriors.

When Lockdown first arrived on Earth to return Optimus Prime to the Creators, he landed the Knight Ship in the Arctic and used it as his base of operations while he and Cemetery Wind took out the remaining Transformers on Earth. Harold Attinger temporarily came aboard the ship to discuss Optimus's recent escape from the bounty hunter, although Lockdown repeatedly stressed that he didn't care about Attinger's vendetta and only wanted the Autobot leader returned to him alive.

When Attinger and his unit found Optimus again, Lockdown piloted the Knight Ship over the highway where Optimus was battling the human-controlled Galvatron drone. Lockdown interrupted the fight and managed to tangle Prime—and Tessa Yeager, who had been accidentally caught in the crossfire—in a net of his own devising, then hauled him up into the ship's cargo belly. Optimus was locked upside down in a cage surrounded by various other aliens, while the car Tess had been trapped in was sent to the ship's waste disposal chamber.

His mission on Earth complete, Lockdown flew the Knight Ship over Chicago, causing panic in the streets, and rendezvoused with Cemetery Wind, who handed over the Seed as payment for his services. The bounty hunter activated the ship's dark matter drives and prepared to break Earth's atmosphere. What Lockdown didn't know was that the Autobots Hound, Drift, Bumblebee, and Crosshairs, along with their human allies Cade Yeager and Shane Dyson, had infiltrated the ship, intending to rescue their allies. Crosshairs sabotaged the ship's workings and forced it to fire mooring cables into nearby skyscrapers, causing a distraction and buying time. Alerted to the stowaways, Lockdown ordered his troops to find and kill them before the ship departed.

Tessa encountered a pack of Steeljaws, who chased her through the ship's corridors, while Cade and Shane stumbled across an armory that had once belonged to the knights. Cade salvaged a gun from the armory and used it to fight off a group of mercenaries attempting to apprehend him. The three humans, reunited, shimmied down the mooring cables and were eventually rescued by Bumblebee.

Hound, Drift, and Crosshairs eventually worked their way to the main prison complex, and after Hound had an unpleasant encounter with an alien, rescued Optimus Prime from his cell. Optimus told the Autobots that the section of the ship they were in could detach from the rest of the vessel; Hound took the helm, successfully detached the shuttle and sent it toward an abandoned train yard, where the Autobots and humans regrouped. Lockdown took off into space, unaware of what had transpired until the ship was clear of Earth. Furious, he ordered his crew to turn the ship around and head back to Earth, still intent on finishing his job.

Now in control of a space-worthy vessel, Prime informed the humans that although they would recover the Seed from a now-sapient Galvatron, they were done with protecting Earth and would leave the planet as soon as possible. The Autobots flew their ship to Hong Kong. They were intercepted along the way by Galvatron's new army, who shot them out of the sky and sent the shuttle careening toward the Wulong Valley. With no other course of action, Optimus released the legendary warriors from their prison cells and eventually convinced them to join their cause.

Lockdown and the rest of the Knight Ship returned midway into the fracas, utilizing a powerful magnetic weapon to suck up all metal in the area, including the Autobots. This prompted the Hong Kong government to call the Chinese central government for military support. Optimus managed to destroy the electromagnet as the vessel passed over a factory. Age of Extinction

The Last Knight film

So what should we call it? The Death's Head?. Nah, that's taken.

Daytrader found the Knight Ship and used it to make good on his promise to get the Autobots a spaceship, delivering it to Crosshairs, Drift, and Hound. The three Autobots, along with Izabella, Sqweeks, and Jimmy, used the ship to travel to Stonehenge for the final battle. The ship was instrumental to the gang's efforts, as it was used as a landing strip for several Osprey's used to transport the humans close enough to deploy. Drift stayed aboard the ship to pilot it while the rest of the crew rolled out. In the aftermath, the Autobots boarded the Knight Ship and flew towards their homeworld (now suspended in Earth's orbit). The Last Knight

Ask Vector Prime

In Tyran 609.23-PX Kappa, Lockdown arrived on a Decepticon-ruled Earth to demand that Optimus Prime be handed over to him. Megatron refused out of pride while Sentinel Prime refused out of loyalty. Lockdown tried to bribe Sentinel with a seed, but in the meantime, Optimus finally reignited Sentinel's sense of compassion. Sentinel proceeded to pretend to hand over Optimus only to betray Lockdown and capture his ship. Teaming up with the Dinobots, Optimus and Sentinel eventually liberated Earth from Decepticon control and used the seed to revitalize Cybertron. Ask Vector Prime, 22 July 2015

Notes

• A témenos (τέμενος) is, from the original Greek, a piece of land cut off and assigned to either some high authority or dedicated to a god.
• The model used for Lockdown's ship is the same as the model used for the Creator's ships albeit without the large circular glowing part on top.
• The model used for the ship's netting drone is the same as the Ark from Dark of the Moon.
• According To Industrial Light & Magic VFX Supervisor Scott Farrar, the reasoning behind the Knightship being engulfed in clouds during its second appearance is because the ship is so large that it generates its own weather system when inside Earth's atmosphere.^[2]

References