We're discussing the vessel the outline of which can be seen in the plans in the first post.
I doubt that's the refinery...
I am aware of what is being discussed. And you are correct that the deck plans at the beginning of the thread are not the refinery.
The massive size of the ship is due to a mineral refinery (I apologize for calling it an oil refinery) and 20 billion tons of ore, which dwarfs the
Nostromo itself. I just have never heard someone using such leviathan adjectives to describe the tug itself.
Continue pontificating.
.
Don't worry, I will.
But are you really? Aware, I mean -- and I mean it as a serious question; I'm not being facetious. Because the leviathan adjectives that you quoted
were actually used in reference to the Nostromo by itself,
not including the refinery. I know this for an incontrovertible fact, because it was I myself who used them -- you were quoting me.
As for the relevance of such adjectives -- if you check further back to the first post on page 3 of this thread, you'll find some images from the production that provide some clues to the implied size of the vessel. That discussion continues on page 4.
For instance, extrapolate the 12m wide shuttle in the inverted "trench" between the main hull and the port nacelle, and you find that the ship could be up to half a kilometre in beam! This is obviously unreasonable, and just exemplifies the scale mismatch between the different models and detail sets -- however, it
does show that Sir Ridley's intent was to imply a ship of truly stupendous proportions.
Then the refinery is orders of magnitude bigger than
that.
If you read my posts on this thread from the beginning, you'll find some of my reasoning behind
why a simple "tugboat" -- which I absolutely agree is precisely what the Nostromo is -- could, and
should, be this gigantic size.