I have said this numerous times already on here but it doesn't make sense for this to NOT be LV-426 and the orig derelict.
let's examine these again:
The films set before ALIEN - check,
but not necessarily before the ship in
alien becomes derelict.
The film is set on a similar planet to LV-426 which also just happenes to orbit a huge ringed gas giant - check,
but, as pointed out numerous times, the planets is
not similar at all. the atmosphere is way thinner, and it has older geological formations -- eroded mountains, plains, formations involving liquid water. LV-426 as a dense, cold atmosphere that probably rains methane like on titan in our own solar system, and is covered in new volcanic formations. it's a planetoid under constant geological stress, with no time to erode.
they both orbit a ringed gas giant, but i don't know how significant that is, considering
literally half of the planets in our own solar system are ringed gas giants.
you have space jockeys in this - check, you have the space jockey ship in this - check,
obviously that's a connection. but i don't think it's very supported that it's the
same ship with the
same pilot. indeed this one
crashes, when...
you have the space jockey ship CRASH in this - check!.
... the one in
alien is simply derelict with no sign of a crash. in the original script, it was safely landed.
Its jusyt going to confuse way too many people who haven't been following this film as closely as we have if this isn't about the derelict and LV-426 etc.
it's a direct tie to another movie, and ridley scott has said a number of times stuff about how he doesn't want to do that, and how if this movie had a sequel, it wouldn't be
alien.
assuming for a second that the one on LV-426 is a separate ship, it could have already been there for centuries, millenia
Yes. Favorite solution.
this was, in fact, the popular theory among fan prior to
prometheus -- that the ship had been there for quite some time. now, we're trying to place the ship as a new arrival within a few years of
alien (or if you read the fake "alien harvest" script, HOURS). it makes no sense -- the pilot is mummified and dessicated (they say "fossilized" but that's not right).
And the common counterpoint is "Who knows what happens to said planet in the last 11 minutes"[I think it was 11 minutes the trailer editor said he didn't have to pick from for the trailer]. The reverse terraforming idea has been brought up. A terrible planetary catastrophe, endless things. These beings have the power of gods, imagine what other weapons they have beyond the obvious biological ones....
let me put it this way. approximately 65 million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the earth, hitting about where the yucatan peninsula is today. before it even struck, shockwaves liquified everything within a few thousand miles. tsunamis and earthquakes crossed the globe. as the asteroid struck, it exploded with a force about a thousand times more than every nuclear weapon owned by the US and the soviet union at the height of the cold war. it rained fire and brimstone all over the world, and the surface of the planet burned. the crater kicked so much dust up into the atmosphere that the planet suffered nuclear winter for generations. something like 90% of all life on the face of the planet died.
and yet, our planet looks almost exactly identical to the way it did right before the extinction event. we're missing a few non-avian dinosaurs, but birds? reptiles? amphibians? insects? flowers? all the stuff you'd think would have disappeared because it was too fragile? most of that stuff is still around. out geology is unchanged, and our climate very similar. if you'd go back 65 million years and take some landscape photos, people would think you took them today.
now, if these "space jockeys" can do something to a planet in 11 minutes that makes the K-T event look insignificant... why the hell are they screwing around with wimpy little xenomorphs? these guys have
weapons of planetary destruction. they literally have to
move LV-426's orbit to make it change this drastically.
It would be sad to only get dead SJ's again.
i don't think so. i think it adds to their mysterious nature, which i actually don't want to see fully explained. explanations are so boring.
They don't look as dense to me, but my argument all along has been from a creative angle. I don't believe Ridley would use another ringed planet if it was a different planet, unless there's a really good story reason for it.
well, i won't deny the creative angle. you never really know.
but as for story reasoning, maybe these guys like gas giants for some reason. gas giants tend to collect rings and lots of small moons, potentially good for close networks of outposts, mining, who knows. gas giants are also extremely common planets -- small, rocky planets like ours seem to be the exception. and scientifically, they're much harder to find. every extra-solar we know about today is a gas giant.
Or, more likely, it's just not LV426 as we have been told. 
Occam's Razor.
it's funny, i had someone on reddit try and use ockham's razor to say it is.
