The climax of Star Fox Assault sees the Great Fox, the Star Fox team's mothership and home base, destroyed in battle against the Aparoids. This is why in the next installment, Star Fox Command, it's been replaced with a smaller space carrier.

According to Takaya Imamura in a 2011 Nintendo Dream magazine interview, this particular model the Star Fox team rented is a common battleship type, which actually explains why other characters that appear throughout the story, such as Wolf and Lucy, are shown to have their own ships of the same model.