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Build a large enough 'rocket ship' that it doesn't matter precisely what it's made of as it will drag its own atmosphere with it. A roughly spherical one approximately 13,000km wide would do nicely. Perhaps harvest planets in order to do so. This will be reasonably resistant to wear and tear unless your passengers start doing really stupid things (disclaimer: anecdotal evidence suggests this may be more of a risk than you thought). Provided that doesn't happen, it will last much longer than your typical generation ship would be designed for, so you can move it around the universe much more slowly. You then 'merely' need to solve the problems of how to accelerate it (0.5g will get you most places after a reasonably small number of generations), and how to supply it with energy (A sufficiently large fusion source would work - no need to have one 1.4m km wide, perhaps bury several fusion plants under the surface). Probably wouldn't hurt to make the ship rotate, so make it rotate around a pole, and put the thrusters/engine/whatever at one pole.