Yeah, in my head, the model of this doesn't necessarily tie a given AI (or a community of AIs, or a pool of we-can't-even-model it intelligence that only someti

Yeah, in my head, the model of this doesn't necessarily tie a given AI (or a community of AIs, or a pool of we-can't-even-model it intelligence that only sometimes bothers with splitting itself into identities) to a ship all that tightly. A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.