Update: Answered in the comments much more thoroughly and succinctly than I can summarize, so head below for some great answers.
She’s apparently the warrant officer, which I’ve seen hypothetical explanations state is the XO, the second in command, but she explicitly states that she is the third officer at the end of the movie, and throughout The movie she is the pilot and she checks the electrician’s work and volunteers to go fight the alien first, and also states that she is in command while the others were off the ship.
So was Kane second in command?
And what is a warrant officer?
Thank you
BTW if there is a crazy Aliens expert, I have a few tiny questions that only a crazy fan who literally read everything ever written and watched every interview about the movie might be able to answer.
Well, a warrant officer is essentially an in between rank. In most militaries, they’re one notch higher than an NCO (non commissioned officer) but below a commissioned officer.
Now, if that doesn’t mean anything to you, an NCO gets rank through direct service from enlistment at the lowest rank, with a hard limit (during peace time anyway) on how high they can go without extra training. A commissioned officer is usually going to start at the lowest commissioned rank right out of an academy or other training facility. Mind you, this varies even between services, and can vary even more between nations, and is over simplified.
I don’t think that the Nostromo was a military vessel at all, so being the warrant officer could have any meaning at all within the context of the film. That being said, I got the impression she was basically the person in charge of cargo and gear used in the work as an exploratory commercial ship. The position as third mate or the equivalent would have been more about chain of command than any specific training the way the military would have. One if those things where the job is dangerous, so the possibility of death is high enough that you want to know who is in charge if the worst happens, but everyone is able to run the ship to some degree as well.
Kane was the SIC/XO for sure, but his job wasn’t ever detailed beyond that, which is one of those hand wave things that happens in movies. If the ship was run like the merchant marines, the deck officers (Dallas, Kane and Ripley) would have more specific duties and roles, but I got the impression that the company didn’t function like a merchant navy at all, and the ranks were largely applied as a nod to tradition rather than a real world analog.
Outside the movie universe, I suspect that the writer just didn’t bother to look into naval rankings, or other sailing ranks and just went with what they liked in the way of terminology.
But I would say that the structure was closer to merchant marines than anything else in the real world within the movie.
All of that stuff comes from second hand info though. I had a few cousins that were merchant marines, and a few family members that held various ranks in either the US Navy or Coast Guard. My grandfather was career Navy, and ended up going from enlisted into officer training and retired as a Commander. So I picked up a bit, but never experienced it directly.
I tend to think of those parts being window dressing rather than world building since it’s never given any weight in the other movies.