Is Prometheus Just A Landing Craft?

was THE MAGELLAN only ever referred to in those 'fake' scripts?

If i am not wrong prometheus is the ship that takes crew on that planet. There are few other ground vehicles, i am not sure about their names.

@Sky I 2nd... talk about fuel consumption is a no-brainer as (am I wrong here) we don't know what Prometheus runs on and what FTL consumes... be it solid fuel, yoghurt or good vibes. ;)

guy you are absolutally right. Prometheus is a landing ship..

I remember reading the prometheus is the main ship and the magellan the landing crafts, but from what we have seen it's all one ship.....HOWEVER we have seen those smaller flying craft since the first tv spots. seen 20 secs into this trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBXXQYZc6sA&feature=fvwrel 2nd EDIT: seems that may just be the lifeboat with landing gear extended

I think the authors don't even know the existence of the concept specific impulse. The basic assumption is that FTL is achieved through something really compact, that doesn't require enormous tanks of fuel (good vibes seem the most likely). From the Weyland timeline we see that they develop a ship capable of FTL travel, called Heliades. Somewhere else on that site (iirc) we read that the Prometheus is a Heliades class ship, so I suppose that what we see is the whole of the ship. The consumables for life support should be limited because it is assumed that the crew spends almost all the time in hypersleep. In Alien (the Nostromo is not very different in size from the Prometheus) the fact that the resources are limited is mentioned. ALso, the Nostromo has no fuel tanks either (and I don't think that they are included in the refinery).

my guess... it's EVENT HORIZON!!!!!!!

Magellan was not a name from a fake script. I was a name seen on the bulkhead of a door in the first released pictures from Pinewood. As far as I know, there has been no other mention of it since from Fox or Ridley. It very well could have been the first name of the ship, that was changed later in production. Things like that happen all the time. But, I do agree. It would make more sense if the Prometheus was separate from the long-range vessel.

Also on the Nostromo Brett and Lambert smoke like chimneys (other than being a wonderful cinematic visual device), So if they smoke (not in a 21st century public place) then we can assume they have unbelievably efficient air-scrubbers!

this specific impulse rule seems to relate to conventional rockets, i did a bit of reading and i cant see a proposal for this in relation to Matter / Anti-matter reaction as a fuel so that could be the work round for that argument,on top of all that its pointless to apply known restrictions to what is essentially a fictional technology. as for the consumables on the ship if your crew are in hibernation for the majority of the flight then that would drop the volume dramatically. If David is the only active crew during the voyage he wont need anything compared to a human.

I'll be fine with whatever explanation they use. I have no interest in attending the film to listen to a thesis or dissertation on FTL travel, aerospace engineering, etc. As long as the storyline and imagery is entertaining, I'll be happy.

Amen to that, a good film it will likely be but still just a film !. The genre isn't called Science - Fact is it.

The prometheus is actually a very large space vessel, maybe Around the size of an aircraft carrier from nowadays and similar in size like the Sulaco. The nostromo was a Towing vessel carrying many tons of minerals. as the crew does hypersleep and in space u dont need propulsion All the time but only used for Accelerating or changing course.

Quote From Rhinos: "I'll be fine with whatever explanation they use. I have no interest in attending the film to listen to a thesis or dissertation on FTL travel, aerospace engineering, etc. As long as the storyline and imagery is entertaining, I'll be happy" +1. It's a film. End of. But I hope it is one hell of a trip!

Yep, I can only second that. We can see in many stills and trailers that the Prometheus is a rather large ship, at least similar in size to the Nostromo and Sulaco, if not even slightly bigger (with different proportions of course). My take is that the Magellan might well be the Life-Pod escape vessel docked to the back of the Prometheus, which in respect isn't too small either (it has its own mess deck). Then there are numerous other vehicles for surface exploration, etc.. As for FTL travel, if I'm not mistaken all you need to do is accelerate the ship to its speed once the flight path/course is set, and since there's no air resistance in a vacuum it will pretty much stay that way. More 'fuel' will then be needed to slow the ship down and/or change the flight path as CBT1979 correctly stated above. Ridley comes from an engineering/industrial design background and always tried to stay as close to reality as possible (one of the factors that made ALIEN so impressive and believable IMO). But we'll all know for sure after the first screening... bring it on! And yes, it's still a sci-fi movie, let's remind ourselves about that from time to time...

The ion propulsion technology actually exists, you can read about it on Wikipedia.

Prometheus IS the ship, you dont need too much food or water when your crew are freeze dried, for the most part and the android doesnt require much more than dry humping Shaw's cryo tube every thursday