STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!

The following section is just about as in depth as you can get. The first section is a direct rip-off of the Technical Manual. The second section is mostly information from "The Book of Alien". I'm currently trying to get some of the sketches and paintings from it, scanned and put up here on the homepage and this guy I got in contact with promised me that he would send me some blueprints of it too. Please pay no attention to the placement of the various pictures :)

From the "Aliens Colonial Marine Technical Manual"

The Nostromo is an M class starcruiser registered to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation out of the US state of Panama. Refitted as a commercial towing vehicle in 2116, the Nostromo has largely been employed running automated ore and oil refineries between Sol system and 20 Reticuli.

Massing 63.000 metric tons, the Nostromo's spaceframe is based on a modified Lockmart CM-99B Bison transporter. The Nostromo is designed to an 6-10-4 layout with three pressurized decks and four main cargo holds. Most of the spare volume is taken up by fuel tanking for the fusion reactor and the reaction mass for the trust engines. An off-axis hood frame mounts the docking latches for the towed cargo. The Nostromo is a sturdy vessel capable of withstanding atmosphere re-entry and for surface landings is supported by three main shocks Micrometeorite and particulate shielding is sufficient to withstand the roughest re-entries.

Inflight systems are controlled by the central "Mother" processor. Mother is a 2.1 Terabyte intelligent mainframe which monitors all ship's flight and autonomic functions. A 2.0 Terabyte backup mainframe comes on line in the event of a CPU failure, and a third tier of automatics is capable of sustaining autonomic functions should the backup fail too.

The communications fit is standard, comprising a 10 and 4 meter hyperstate antenna for interstellar communications and short-range UHF/VHF/HF radio/video links. Sensors are mounted on pylons clustered around the forward hull of the ship and comprise two 2 meter aperture telescopes capable of optical, spectrographic and infrared resolution; a gas chromagraph; centimetric navigation and landing radar; a synthetic aperture ground-mapping radar; and a mass counter for supralight navigation.

The power core is a Laretel WF-15 2,8 Terawatt fusion reactor. The fusion process is a deuterium/tritium reaction that fuses the fuel elements in a containment sphere using conversion lasers. The He⁴ byproducts of the reaction is stored separately and vented at refular intervals. Power is drawn off the reactor by a closed-cycle liquid potassium cooling system. This runs off into an induction torus which uses the intense magnetic fields created by the superheated potassium to generate electrical power. The ship may be scuttled by an authorized crewmember by overriding the reactor cooling system and bleeding off coolant, which in turn initiates a supercritical reaction in the containment sphere, After activation the crew have ten minutes to get clear of the ship before reactor explodes.

Supralight drive is a Yutani T7A NLS tachyon shunt capable of unladen high cruise up to 0.42 ly per day (153 cee). When towing large mass cargoes such as automated refineries, the maximum sustainable cruise speed drops radically, to approximately 0.1-0.12 ly per sidereal day (40-45 cee). For maneuver at sublight speeds while towing a large mass, immensely powerful mass reaction engines are required. Aboard the Nostromo, the original Saturn J-3000 engines have been have been replaced by two Rolls-Royce N66 Cyclone thrust tunnels with bipolar vectoring for midline lift function. Each powerplant develops 65,830 metric tons thrust using water for reaction mass. Running wide open, both engines give high impulse thrust total of 131,660 kN

The lifesystem comprises three decks, including the bridge, crew quarters and mess areas, science station, SPU module, medical bay, four main cargo bays, stores and engineering stations - all comprising a some 1.1 million cubic meters of pressurized volume including the air ducts and air scrubbing plant. The Nostromo has an operating crew of seven - Ship's master, First Officer, Executive Officer. Navigation Officer, Science Officer, Chief Engineer and Engineer's Mate. Seven hypersleep capsules have been installed for long-duration flight. Polarized gravity generators provide internal gravity and inertial dampening. Beneath the hull is an external docking bay for the shuttlecraft (the Narcissus). The shuttle is capable of acting as a lifeboat in the event a ship evacuation is required.

Design Details

One of the reasons for ALIEN being as successful as it was, is the incredible amount of time that went into designing the various equipment that it featured. Ron Cobb, one of the main designers on the Nostromo said: "I recent films that are so shallow they rely entirely on their visual effects ... a lot of effort should be expended toward rendering the environment of the spaceship, or space travel, whatever the fantastic setting of your story should be - as convincingly as possible, but always in the background. That way the story and the characters emerge and they become more real. If you were to set a story on an ocean liner, there would be bits of footage to explain what the ship was like docked or at sea, but it would remain in the background of the story. It should be the same with science fiction"

The bridge was one of the first sets to be created. It is shaped like a hexagon (that's with 6 edges) and is radially symmetrical. It was built in a claustrophobic way on purpose since Ridley Scott wanted it to have a look sort of like a fighterbomber. When he first sat down with the designers of the Nostromo, he showed them Dr. Strangelove and said: "That's what I want. Do you see? Not that it's a B-52 in outer space, but it's a military look". In most other science fiction films with new technology, only the parts that HAVE to work actually work, but in ALIEN most of what was on the screen actually had a working function. Art Director Roger Christian says: "Suddenly we were into actual technology; if you need to seat a real television within a console panel, you have to figure out how to work it in". A lot of the bridge actually consists of junk from various aircrafts.

Paragraph from "The Book of Alien"
"Nick Allder found himself developing real hardware from sketches, and, occasionally, on a verbal request from Scott: "Whatever Ridley wanted, we actually gave him. Luckily we never had to strike a compromise anywhere down the line, A lot of things were basically programmed so that the actor could hit a button and something would really happen. For instance the chair that rolls out over the viewing blister is completely remote; all we had was a fail-safe cutout switch if anything went wrong. The actor could push a button and go forward, or turn left and right. Of the panels in the bridge that work, we made sure that every button had a function so that the actors wouldn't have to fool with dummy controls. After two or three days on the set, the actors really got into it, and I think it helped them."

Every single monitor you see on the Nostromo works. This goes for the ones on the bridge, the ones in the mess, the ones in medical bay and so on. Actually, the medical bay was equipped with actual medical equipment that they had bought from various firms, in order to make it look more like a real life medical bay. The it has to look and act as real life look was also used on the chair that the science officer Ash uses when he surveys the team that ventures into the derelict. The chair is capable of moving along a rail in the floor. All actual movement was controlled from the chair itself by Ian Holm, and as quoted from "The Book of Alien": "All we had was a fail-safe cutout switch if anything went wrong". The chair and the observation blister is located in the lower part of the ship so that you can keep an eye on the ground from it. Ash loves being down there all alone, the blister is his glory.