I don’t think keeping the drop-ship on station is bad tactics. They dropped the team and left the danger zone, but stayed close enough to provide evac or fire-support. Going back to the Sulaco, dealing with leaving and re-entering the atmosphere? I think that would have been a worse idea. For the situation and intel available it was fine. In hindsight, yeah it was a CF. Plus, Cameron would have still had to come up with a way to get the drop-ship out of the picture; this way we got to see Ferro go out like a bad-ass Marine! Going for her weapon with no hesitation.
Have the dropship just fly around. When they call for it, it comes in to land on the pad, with everyone waiting at the edges.
When it lands, it’s suddenly swarmed by aliens. Spunkmeyer shoots but there are too many. He gets tail stabbed. Ferro goes for her gun, tries to take off to point the nose up and have the aliens fall out. She gets killed, drop ship crashes. Huge explosion. Cue Hudson (or is it Hicks?:)) “We’re fucked! Game over man!”
Robo-butler Bishop, still on the Sulaco, fires up the second drop ship, and comes to pick them up. Movie progresses the same. Reactor still damaged, going to blow, but this time from the earlier firefight instead of the crash.
If there was, Bishop wouldn’t have needed to remote pilot the remaining dropship from the surface. Also, a little help with the Queen would have been nice 
You’re right.
An aircraft carrier-sized spaceship with a dozen people on board would have been an eerie thing to see, would have fit well with the existential dread & loneliness of the franchise and would have been cheap to make if they’d used miniatures.
Yes. The dropship might not’ve had sufficient fuel to just circle overhead indefinitely.
How about a consolation prize:
Carrie Henn celebrating her birthday with Colonial Marines and a synthetic human. 
Although not shown on-screen wasn’t the Sulaco itself intelligent? After all they have androids, surely the ship itself has a similar AI.
That could make a pretty interesting movie, at least its a more original idea than yet another sci-fi/horror splatterfest.
Yeah, I figured it was a semi sentient ship, like what was originally designed for Herbert’s VoidShips. I think it was a discussion here that led me to that train of thought.
To get the colonists out and still make a gory movie, take DNA and memory ingrams* from the colonists, then shoot up the place. You can clone them later into another dangerous planet situation.
*star trek technobabel
More like the Egyptian*Behedeti *(winged sun disk) (See also - certain Chrysler, Mini, Aston Martin, Bentley logos)
Perhaps everyone else already knows this but I just realized: The Weyland-Yutani logo looks like an open toothed mouth which highlights WY’s xenomorph-like, ravenous, predatory nature: https://www.google.ca/search?q=weyland+yutani+logo&num=20&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwie5aa5-dndAhWNm-AKHREJAA0Q_AUIDigB&biw=1527&bih=835
Hmm. I definitely remember the winged sun logo (thanks MrDibble! That is definitely what it is), but does the “alternate” logo actually appear in Alien or Aliens?
Re ship A.I. capabilities: remember also that in the original movie authorized personnel were able to hold conversations with “Mother”.
Bumped.
The cast of *Aliens *reunited at Comic-Con three years ago - here’s a short group interview: Sigourney Weaver And ‘Aliens’ Cast Reunite 30 Years Later | TODAY - YouTube
Except that we know from Alien that the W-Y was fully aware of what the risks were - they sent the Nostromo to LV426 with the intent of bringing back the Xenomorph:
Priority One
Insure (sic?) return of Organism for analysis.
All other considerations secondary.
Crew Expendable.
(emphasis mine)
All other considerations secondary? Really? Other than the ship that is supposed to return this organism, and a crew needed to program / fly it home …
W-Y wanted that thing at any cost, including the cost of sending a multi-trillion (dollar? credit?) Terra-forming plant, crew, support staff, and families, after losing a multi-trillion dollar mining plant, ship and tug sent looking for it.
Either that, or the future of corporations on this planet looks no better than what we have today (the index finger on the right hand not knowing what the right thumb is doing - let alone the other hand!!)
It’s a great movie. But I found the section where they set up the sentry guns interesting. The sentry guns mowed through alien after alien, but then they were like “We’re running out of ammo!” So I’m left wondering why they were running out of ammo. My guess is the “Corporation” didn’t care about the outcome, they just wanted intel on the aliens.
They had limited ammo because most their supplies blew up in the dropship when it crashed.
I suspect this is the most likely case, also given the time lapses involved. After the Nostromo crew doesn’t return, the whole case file gets buried for decades (and likely scrubbed of incriminating parts first).
If W-Y was actively aware that the xenomorph was there and was trying to get it as a corporate endeavor, not just Burke trying to side hustle it, then they repeatedly picked such stupid ways to do it that it cheapens the whole movie. “Hey, we want to catch a tiger so let’s send colonists to build a village in the jungle and hope that one day a tiger eats the farmers so we can send a couple soldiers to also get eaten until one guy catches a tiger and then has to sneak it back overseas.”
After having learned more about the Vietnam war and especially having watched a documentary about the Cu Chi Tunnels, it strikes me that this is the best formulation of why North Vietnam won.
If you like Aliens, you’ll enjoy the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ejFuEyHyk
I know this is a multiply-bumped thread, but just to comment on the “42 million dollars for a giant starship” issue: From a 2013 Bloomberg article, the Danish shipping company Maersk ordered a new class of really huge container ships. For a few years they were the largest container ships on Earth. The Bloomberg article describes this as “the most gigantic risk Maersk has ever taken”. Those ships cost $185 million each. Nostromo certainly doesn’t seem like the latest and greatest thing in space, nor was it shiny and new at the time of the events of the original movie. So “$42 million” doesn’t seem that far off for a grotty, old, industrial ship. (Accepting, as is generally necessary for this kind of “space opera”, a very radical increase in the human race’s capabilities as a “space-faring” species. It costs tens of billions of dollars to put some tin cans in Low Earth Orbit because we’re not very good at it yet.)
Another data point, from 2015:
So, that’s apparently $160 million for three ships (two lake vessels, like the infamous Edmund Fitzgerald, and an oceangoing ship), which comes to a bit over $53 million apiece.
Clearly what they needed was harsher language.