The movie prop was constructed for James Cameron´s ALIENS (1986) movie. Syd Mead is responsible for the design and Skotak Brothers for the construction. Interesting Thing is, that the rail-guns positions were changed and the whole model is detailed from the right side only.
In the story is the ship assigned as a transport for colonial Marines (USCM-United States Colonial Marines), which must investigate, what happened with the colony on the LV426. That´s all to the movie line. In the bigger perspective there is no proper (correct) information. Most fans disagree on the major details of the back story. Personally, the only things that I can state are facts that were mentioned in the movie. So, the U.S.S. Sulaco is a little bit over 731 meters in length, carry two of the UD-4L Drop-ships (I can tolerate 4). The hangar for the drop-ships is over 80 meters in length. By the number of EEV vehicles we can calculate hypothetical capacity to 100 people. There are 30 crew members confirmed (two drops with 15 people). In the front hull there are 5 hangars for incoming ships. Two Portal ramps operated in front of the hangar doors on each side of the ship. Other functions are unknown. How is artificial gravity works, What kind of engines the ship have?..And so on. From the outer signs we can guess something about the weapons (cannons, rail-guns, partial beams), or engine character (rounded reactor with the " cooling tower")
U.S.S. Sulaco the is first ship of three (Sulaco, Sulaco3, Patna) paper-models, which will be downloadable here piece by piece trough time. Model has dirty navy blue camouflage. There is an Add-on in the shape of two drop-ships known as Bug Stopper 01 & Smart Ass 02 and an emergency escape vehicle - The BD-409 EEV in new and destroyed. All kits are designed to be printed on A4 format paper. The completed ship will be 175cm in this scale and printing settings. If you want to know more about printing or you have another question, first visit F.A.Q. section. You can find all of the models in the " Download" section
http://www.sulaco.cz/uss_sulaco.html#
Side plates with ship logo
Group 02 is not too hard to build. Level of difficulty is 2/5. That one point is for small parts. The whole group has 18 parts on 3 sheets
The final unit look like this picture and represents 7% of the whole ship.
