Good point. Since space travel is often basically modeled in sci-fi as basically like ocean voyages of old, we should assume there are pirates and raiders.
Just learned about these detailed *Alien *and *Aliens *1/16-scale metallic resin figures (six inches tall):
http://www.historicrail.com/Dallas-1_16-Figure/productinfo/103233/
http://www.historicrail.com/Alien-Parker/productinfo/702706/
http://www.historicrail.com/Xenomorph-1_16-Figure/productinfo/103228/
http://www.historicrail.com/Lt-Ripley/productinfo/703033/
http://www.historicrail.com/Corporal-Hicks-1_16-Figure/productinfo/103230/
They completely ignored any mention of that. Or time at all. Hicks said that they would be declared overdue in 17 days, not that help would arrive in 17 days.
The whole thing of hypersleep for interstellar travel is unclear. Do FTL voyages still take a long time, so sleep is preferable to twiddling you thumbs for a month of boredom, or is it just that something about FTL travel messes up your brain, unless you are in special hypersleep? The latter makes more sense, but they never said.
It’s probably that Hollywood types just don’t know how BIG space really is.
There is one possible clue to travel time in a deleted scene in Aliens: Ellen Ripley had promised to arrive on Earth in time for her daughter’s 11th birthday. While it’s possible that she made this promise years in advance, I think it more likely that the promise was made to 10-year-old Amanda. It feels like the kind of promise a parent would make to a child shortly after missing a birthday, and “I’ll miss your next two birthdays, but I’ll be here when you turn 11” doesn’t seem like it would go over well.
That suggests a round-trip time to Thedus (where the Nostromo picked up the refinery it was towing home) of less than a year, but not so much less that Ripley expected to be sent back out before Amanda’s birthday. That gives us a frame of maybe 9 to 11 months. Let’s take the low end of that, and further assume that:
a) It took no more than a few days to hook up to the refinery.
b) The extra mass of the refinery didn’t add significantly to the duration of the return leg.
c) In the Alien script, Dallas says that they’re “only halfway to Earth”. (I forget if that line was delivered onscreen.) Even taking the statement as a rough approximation, we can infer that they’re not very far off the direct-line course and somewhere in the middle third of the leg. No one particularly complained about how much the diversion delayed them, and you’d expect someone (particularly Ripley) to do so if it were substantial.
So, if they were in the middle third of a 4.5-month return leg, LV-426 is at least 1.5 to 3 months travel from Earth on a freighter. We don’t know how much faster the Sulaco is, but it’s still likely a trip measured in months. That’s really fast in terms of interstellar travel, but it’s still months in a confined space with a bunch of active people who have nothing useful to do. It wouldn’t be logistically impossible to keep the marines fed, in training, and not killing each other under those conditions…but if hypersleep is safe and cheap, why not skip all that?
Very good analysis, Balance.
Now explain how a non-FTL emergency shuttle can drift all the way “through the core systems” in only 57 years? 
More like 57 million years, amirite?
Maybe it actually has FTL drive, but it’s a crappy one, and nav system was worse. (It was probably at least as rundown as the rest of the ship, and may well have gotten damaged in the escape.) Maybe it would have gotten Ripley to Earth in a year or two with its lower-powered FTL drive, but it went off course.
Alternatively, since we don’t know much about the principles of the FTL drive in the setting, the escape pod could have “borrowed” an FTL state from the Nostromo. The ship was under way when Ripley launched the shuttle, which means it was presumably traveling FTL at that point. If the drive relies on something similar to a warp bubble, the bubble around the shuttle may have decayed once separated from the ship, causing it to slow and eventually drop to sublight velocity. Once again, it could have had a shoddy or damaged nav system–or it could simply not have been intended to travel interstellar distances at all, and its local navigation system just wasn’t up to the job.
The Narcissus shuttle does have FTL capabilities.
Ships in the Alienverse don’t blip out of sight or throw off a bunch of cool pyrotechnics when they jump to faster than light speed.
I suspect the hypersleep pods are used to reduce resource requirements and boredom on long space flights and protect the occupant from the stresses of accelerating to faster than light speed.
What I actually suspect is the writers combined two concepts 1) keeping the crew in suspended animation for long, slow sub-light interstellar flights and 2) needing the ships to travel between Earth and other star systems in a reasonable time.
I think the writers just put in the hypersleep a) it’s all sci-fi and shit; and b) it gave them a way to put the crew (and therefore, the audience) into a situation without warning. Imagine if the Nostromo had just been cruising along with the crew awake and running the ship when an order was received to check out LV-426. I think it could have been handled just as well, but something would have been lost. A bit of the feeling of helplessness for the crew.
I think that’s probably correct. Also a bit of a sense of how far they were from home. Like it’s the sort of journey you want to be asleep for. Also that help isn’t just going to pop out of hyperspace.
A more pressing question is for the role of Vasquez, why did James Cameron use white Jewish actress Jenette Goldstein in the role of “stereotypical tough Latina action chick” instead of Maria Conchita Alonso or Rachel Ticotin?
She passed the audition?
Was there even a stereotype for “Tough Latina action chick” in Hollywood action films at that point? Feels more like Vasquez made the stereotype; she’s certainly the first one I think of when hearing the term.
She acts in a lot of James Cameron movies. She was John Connor’s mother in Terminator 2
Maybe neither Alonso nor Ticotin had the raw muscular physique that Goldstein (IIRC a bodybuilder as well as an actress) already had, and they didn’t want to go through the grueling physical training to acquire it.
Additionally, there is a story that Goldstein misunderstood what she was auditioning for and dressed up like a tough Latina for the movie Aliens thinking that it was about Illegal Aliens.
Confirmed in this story and interview.
Cameron also hints at it in the script: “Hudson: Somebody said alien…she thought they said illegal alien and signed up.”
Also the mom of the two cute Irish kids in Titanic, and she has a foothold in the Star Trek universe, too.
She comes across as a stereotype when watching the film as an adult, but from reading the background on the character, in conjunction with what’s in the film, she feels more three-dimensional.
Just introduced Aliens to my teenage sons (they loved it), and enjoyed it all over again myself. Two things I hadn’t noticed before: one of the Company bureaucrats seated at the table in Ripley’s hearing is doing a crossword puzzle, and Newt exclaims “Mommy!” before hugging Ripley, just after the Alien Queen goes out the airlock.
Sigourney Weaver is featured in an upcoming episode of PBS’s Finding Your Roots, to air June 30. Check local listings: Finding Your Roots | Sigourney Weaver
Bumped.
A very interesting 2016 article I just came across: