Sulaco (spaceship)

The Sulaco is a fictional spaceship shown in the movie Aliens. Her name comes from a fictional port in Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.

Description
Used by the United States Colonial Marines, the Sulaco is a Conestoga-class starship, originally designed as troop and logistics transports. By 2179, these ships had been converted into a rapid-response military transport, with orbital bombardment and fleet support capabilities.

The Sulaco displaces 78,000 metric tons and measures 385 meters in length. In her role as a troop carrier, Sulaco carries two dropships and has sufficient life support capabilities for 90 crew and passengers. In an emergency, as many as 2,000 troops can be placed in hibernation in the main cargo hangars.

She is powered by a 3.6 terawatt fusion reactor using high density lithium hydride for fuel. Sublight propulsion is provided by four GF-2400 rocket motors using industrial carbon-diamond as reaction mass. FTL propulsion is provided by a hyperdrive tachyon shunt, with a maximum speed of 0.74 light years per sidereal day. The Sulaco's hull panels are constructed from radar absorbing material, which reduces the ship's radar cross section to low levels.



Armaments

 * Eight long-range ASAT missiles fired from the dorsal launch bay
 * Two forward-firing 800 MeV Neutral Particle Beam weapons, which can disable the electronics systems of enemy spacecraft out to a range of 100,000 km
 * Four (two twin turrets, one dorsal, one ventral) Kinetic Energy Railguns
 * Two 80 MW point-defence lasers for vaporizing incoming missiles and kinetic energy rounds
 * Ventral mine dispenser — magazine can hold up to 60 orbital fragmentation mines, or an unspecified number of 'orbital net' mines (which upon deployment form a 'spiderweb' many kilometres in diameter, to be dropped into the orbital path of another starship — collision at high relative velocities would then be enough to damage or even slice apart the opposing starship, even though the web filament would be comparatively insubstantial)
 * Up to 80 guided re-entry vehicles including bunker buster, high-explosive, and nuclear warheads
 * 20 decoy ballutes and two maneuverable decoy drones in after ventral bay.

Movie Design
Syd Mead, a principal conceptual designer on Aliens, first designed the Sulaco as a massive sphere, bristling with antennae. James Cameron was not satisfied; he sketched the "style" of ship he imagined, which was more like a streamlined warship plying the black. Syd's subsequent redesign is what we see on screen: he maximized Cameron's direction, making the Sulaco — a battleship — essentially an enlarged version of a pulse rifle.