The starship Heart of Gold was the first spacecraft to make use of the Infinite Improbability Drive. The craft was stolen by then-President Zaphod Beeblebrox at the official launch of the ship, as he was supposed to be officiating the launch. Later, during the use of the Infinite Improbability Drive, the ship picked up Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, who were floating unprotected in deep space in the same star sector, having just escaped the destruction of the same planet.
Design crew
The design crew had worked secretively for quite a while on the Heart of Gold on Damogran. The engineers and researchers who built it were mostly humanoid, though there was one who was a superintelligent shade of the colour blue.
Ship design and appearance
The Heart of Gold as seen in the television program.
As the ship is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, it would be statistically impossible for the ship not to change appearance at least as frequently as the whim of a Hollywood director changes.
The Heart of Gold is 150 meters long. It is shaped like a running shoe, and it is generally rather white.
The cabin is mostly white, oblong and about the size of a smallish restaurant. It is not, however, perfectly oblong. Two long walls have been raked round in a slight parallel curve. All of the angles and corners of the cabin are contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have gotten miserable. The cabin looks excitingly purposeful. There are large video screens ranging over control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall.
The entire ship is outfitted with the latest GPP (Genuine People Personalities) utilising technology. All the doors in the spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close with the knowledge of a job well done (though in the film, the doors sigh when they open and close). For better or for worse, Marvin the Paranoid Android, who came with the ship, has a very depressing GPP prototype.
The entire ship is outfitted with a tannoy system, which allows for announcements to be made across the entire ship at once.
Propulsion System
The unique thing about the Heart of Gold is that it is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, a small golden box at the heart of the ship — hence its name. This is, of course, powered by an infinite improbability generator. As soon as the ship's drive reaches infinite improbability, it passes through every point in the Universe, thus allowing the ship to go anywhere without all of that mucking about with hyperspace and what not.