Shining in the light of an alien sun, the Alliance Starship Aurora maintained a geosynchronous orbit over the planet Cestus 3. A Federation Ambassador-class starship, the Tucker, was to the Aurora's starboard side, while a blockier, single-hulled Gorn warship was to port. One could notice some vague similarities in the layout of the Federation and Alliance ship, principally with the layout of a primary hull and a drive hull with a bow-mounted navigational deflector dish, with the warp nacelles attached by pylons to the sides.
There were clear design differences, however. The smaller Federation ship's primary hull was a saucer attached by a clear neck to the round drive hull. The kilometer-long Aurora's primary hull, while wide proportionately as well, had a long shape to it, closer to an arrowhead than a saucer, and the drive hull started much further up, directly connected to the primary hull with the deflector dish only about twenty-five percent of the way down the ship's length and almost directly below the location of the main bridge at the top of the primary hull. The two hulls shared a wide and long connection area, flowing together without any visible neck. The rear end of the primary hull was marked by a drop in height of over fifty meters. Toward the top of this drop was the main shuttle bay for the ship while, below it, was the armored dock for a supporting attack or scout ship; in this case, the Starship Koenig. Below this dock, at the top of the drive hull, was the recovery deck for the Aurora's starfighter wing laid over the hanger deck and its attached launch tubes for the eighty-eight Mongoose starfighters of the vessel.
The drive hull itself started to extend down to the ship's lowest thirty-third through thirty-fifth decks aft of the deflector dish, providing additional machinery spaces and the decks used by the ship's company of Marines, with the secondary shuttle bay at the rear of Deck 32 towards the stern. Four long, sleek warp nacelles with bright blue ramscoops and drive coil sections were arranged in a flat X shape around the drive hull, just far out enough to give their hydrogen-collecting ramscoops clearance around the hull.
