The AU thing was not an "oversight". 82 was intentional. Changing it was a "fix" that accomplished nothing except change the original intent. There's a deleted line where Spock mentions V'ger has a magnetic field greater than Earth's sun, hence a "powerfield" so enormous (this how far out the heliopause is). Another change to the original intent for no good reason except it seemed more reasonable to some fanboys on the project.
The fact is, neither one really works. I mean... V'Ger was traveling at warp. Faster than anything can move in normal space. The only way the energy cloud could've stayed with it is if it were also inside the warp field, or were
itself the warp field. A warp field 2 AU across is still very hard to buy, but a warp field the size of an entire star system? That's a much bigger ask.
Although... I suppose it is possible that the cloud could "travel" faster than light outside the warp field if it weren't actually a continuous physical object. I mean, if you point a powerful laser at the Moon from the Earth's surface and sweep it sideways, the spot of light on the Moon's surface can appear to move faster than light. That's because it's not a single object, but a succession of reflections of many different photons off of different parts of the Moon's surface. So a
pattern can move FTL when a material object can't. Maybe V'Ger's energy cloud could be the result of some kind of energy emissions leaking through the warp field inducing luminescence in the particles of the interstellar medium as it passed. But if that were so, it's hard to buy that it could be so organized and cohesively shaped. It would probably waver and shift like an aurora as it passed through areas of different ISM density and composition. (Also, if you were using optical sensors, you wouldn't see it until it reached you, and then you'd see it moving
backward as the light from further away caught up with you.)
Still, the main advantage of the reduction to 2 AU is the
Enterprise's travel time through the cloud. If we assume the cloud was V'Ger's warp field, or contained inside its warp field, then it's hard to imagine how a ship could be traveling at warp relative to a surrounding warp bubble. It looked as though the ship was closing in on V'Ger at relative sublight speed. That would've taken hours if they had to cover dozens of AUs. Now, to cover a 1 AU radius -- that's 8.3 light-minutes -- in 5-6 minutes would still need to be faster than light, but the cloud was shown to be narrower at the equator, and the ship was shown to make an equatorial approach to the cloud, so maybe they only had to cover about 4 light-minutes in 5-6 minutes, and that works.
I love movies like the Amityville Horror...
I'm not a fan of that movie, because it claimed to be based on a true story. Fiction is one thing, deliberately hoaxing the gullible is another. (I feel that strongly because I used to
be that gullible. As a kid, I believed all that stuff -- ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, you name it.)
Aliens has some horror to it to, but there's so much action going on that you don't have much time to dwell on the horror element (though there is a great deal of suspense as well).
That's the cool thing about
Aliens as a sequel. They didn't just try to rehash the original and do it less well, like too many sequels do. They took the concept from a horror movie and used it to generate a movie in a completely different genre, expanding the universe in a whole new direction.
And it makes sense as a progression. A horror movie is about the fear of facing an unknown threat by yourself. If you survive and escape that threat, what do you do next? You call in the cops, or the military, so they can come back and confront it as a known threat. Now that I think about it, that's pretty much the story arc of many '50s monster movies. The first half is about the protagonists discovering a new threat and trying to figure out what it is and then trying to escape it, and the rest is about the military or the cops mobilizing in force to fight it.
Alien and
Aliens are basically that arc spread over 2 movies. (Much like how
The Creature from the Black Lagoon and
Revenge of the Creature are the arc of
King Kong spread over 2 movies and 2 heroines.)
. If I remember the novel correctly V'Ger was always moving at warp speed until it got close to Earth and the Enterprise was therefore also moving at warp (though within the vessel, I assumed the Enterprise was within the vessels warp field and was not using it's own warp engines while inside--I figured that's why the dialogue always stated 'relative' position because they were also moving).
