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This book was published before 1980, I think.

A group of petty criminals buy a second hand space ship to trade with planets in the outer reaches. Think medieval culture. While there, pirates/bad guys turn up and start to kill/steal from the locals. The petty criminals decide to help out by pretending to be the space patrol. When they are in deep trouble their ship's AI calls for help to the real space patrol. It turns out the second hand ship has an ex-space patrol AI as computer.

I've been looking for this for over 30 years now. I read it as a teen.

EDIT Actually not sure this is what i remember????? It seems to be the same setting but the book i read was before (book time wise this one)Vaughan Roberts was on his first adventure with the AI ship... Am checking out ALL the books i can find

While i cannot find the exact story i remember i am accepting this as answered as it IS the right storyline/charectors :) Cheers all:)

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Interstellar Patrol by Chrisopher Anvil and Eric Flint. It was originally published in two volumes, but I've read it in one volume.

The space patrol puts ships out for sale as a recruiting tool. They then enlist people who use them properly. The ship can also change its appearance.

The starship crew was stuck on a planet where the well-meaning schemes of ivory tower social engineers had created a nightmare of battling gangs. So they pretended to be the "Royal Legions" from a distant star kingdom in hot pursuit of an unspeakably evil and nearly all-powerful villain who was hiding somewhere on the planet.

Things went even better than they had hoped, and the planet was rapidly becoming civilized . . . and then the real Royal Flagship showed up. They thought they were doomed, but instead the new arrivals (who also weren't quite what they claimed to be) thought the crew had shown just the sort of initiative and ingenuity that the Interstellar Patrol was looking for. So they were inducted into the Patrol.

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    Note: 2003 publication date.
    – DavidW
    Commented Nov 12, 2022 at 15:49
  • 2
    Actually, it was originally published as individual short stories, over 30 years before they were collected here. "The King's Legions" was published in 1967, and first collected (with some alterations), according to a note by Eric Flint, into a novel entitled Strangers in Paradise in 1969.
    – JdeBP
    Commented Nov 12, 2022 at 22:27

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