Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 09:01:41 AMQuote from: arachnophilia on Mar 24, 2012, 07:27:39 AMthey 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.
Two, at best, have rings dense enough to be noted here, and I'm not sold on Uranus yet.
the point is that both gas giants and planetary rings are pretty common.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 09:01:41 AMQuote from: arachnophilia on Mar 24, 2012, 07:27:39 AM... the one in alien is simply derelict with no sign of a crash. in the original script, it was safely landed.
For all we know SJ ships regenerate like Borg ships.
what i mean is, there's
no sign of a crash. the landscape is not affected in any way. there's no debris field, no track carved at impact, nothing. it's just
there. there's no evidence that the derelict crashed
at all, it's simply landed on the planet.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 09:01:41 AMWhat about 50 years after the asteroid strike?
it'd be darker, and colder, but not geologically different, and our atmosphere wouldn't have a significantly different composition (aside from a lot more dust).
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 09:01:41 AMThe SJ's have a space ship. They can replicate the K-T event. Xenomorphs may be for use when they want a planet (mostly) intact, minus the major life forms. Although I doubt the Xenomorphs could take over a well armed planet. I don't really know what the xenomorphs are good for. Maybe they aren't a weapon and they didn't kill the SJ race.
the point isn't replicating the K-T event -- for that you'd just have to nudge a large enough asteroid. that takes thrust (or perhaps creative use of gravity) and some calculus. the point is doing something that drastically changes the geology of a planet, from old weathered formations, to new volcanic formations
all over the planet. basically, they'd have had to have ramped up the tectonic activity on the moon, probably through tidal/gravitational forces -- like moving the moon closer to the gas giant. it's also evidently way colder on LV-426, which indicates that the gas giant itself is further away from its star, or the star is cooler.
pushing an asteroid isn't that hard. pushing the moon is a bigger trick. and pushing saturn's a much bigger trick. ...and cooling off the sun?
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 09:01:41 AMI thought we'd been finding rocky planets for the last year. They are harder to find but I wouldn't assume there are less of them.
it's hard to say, of course, but there's much more gas in the universe than there is rock.
Quote from: OpenMaw on Mar 24, 2012, 09:56:28 AMWait wait, every extra-solar planet we know about is a gas giant? Since when? We've known of plenty of POTENTIAL hard surfaced planets out there. It's just pretty much impossible to verify because we don't have any probes that are out far enough (close enough to other solar systems, that'll be centuries from now.).
i might not be up to date on this. as far as i was aware, the only real way to detect to planets was either wobbling of the star (indirect) or observation of something blocking said star (more direct). either way, the planet has to be massive, and that means gas giant.
Quote from: fiveways on Mar 24, 2012, 11:45:36 AMBasically you said exactly what i came here to reply too[Like every point]. And exactly to the xenomorphs. I think the xeno is a really watered down version of the biological weapon. In a more pure form it would ransack a population in a matter of hours to days.
Hell we don't even know what the ampules truly do yet beyond mutate people in weird and wonderful ways and cause humans to birth a mini cthulhu.
Didn't one of the early plot overviews that fox put up on IMDB and had taken down say they were resource hunters? totally planetary destruction and resource harvesting really don't go hand in hand.
the original concept was that the alien only lived about 12 hours. speculation was that it was a weapon designed to burn through a population and leave the resources intact.
Quote from: Ballzanya on Mar 24, 2012, 09:33:46 PMThe ringed gas giant isn't Lv-426, its the planet that it orbits. If I'm not mistaken there were other moons orbiting it as well. The events of Prometheus are most likely on one of those other moons or planetoids.
there are at least three moons of that gas giant, including LV-426. there's some confusion here because the same plate used for the approach of the nostromo is used again for the sky from LV-426. i seriously doubt this movie takes place on one of the other moons, either.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 10:18:19 PM
fiveways - It sounds like the Alien we've seen so far is weaker due to mixing with a human host. The Dogburster Alien isn't worlds different though. Not as different as it sounds like the Prometheus Xenos will be, which is odd considering a dog is more unlike a human than the SJ's may be.
you're forgetting that the alien has a lot in common with the pilot, too.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 10:18:19 PMThe "biological weapon" angle doesn't make much sense. They can reproduce themselves, but it takes time.
the entire plot of
alien takes place within 12 hours. gestation is fast.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 10:18:19 PMIt's not as fast as manufacturing a robot. I think you could do more with small swarming robots than the Alien.
the derelict is biological. the engineers are
biological engineers. they don't have mechanical technology, they have biomechanical technology. everything is grown.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 10:18:19 PMIt doesn't take a 9 foot tall monster to kill a man. A drop of poison on a robot the size of a fly will do. The Alien works great as a natural organism that can kill effectively when you're unprepared for it, but a squad of not-ready Colonial Marines was able to wreak havoc on the LV-426 hive. The LV-426 hive lost its Queen. Imagine if they had one guy in an enclosed, acid proof mech suit. The Colonial Marines have the technology. One guy could stomp bugs all day long.
they're not there to kill. they're there to replace and die. they use the host as raw materials, and their genetic code as a shortcut for adapting to the environment, and live just long enough to spread like a virus. theoretically, that adaptation should include
intelligence too. and copying humans, they have opposable thumbs. there's really no reason they couldn't pick up and use human technology, like guns.
Quote from: jeremy_ray on Mar 24, 2012, 10:18:19 PMThe idea of the Predators breeding Aliens for sport is pretty good though.
i always thought that cheapened the whole idea.