Why WY established colony on LV-426 without investigating Derelict ship?

[SM]

You might be over thinking it to be honest.  There's very little known about what precisely happened, but best I can tell is that AI reached a point where humanity turned against them and created a virus to take them out.  Androids then introduced their own virus that wiped out most computer systems and databases and over 240 colonies.

[oberonqa]

Hehe fair enough.  I do tend to overthink things.  It does help me pass the time when I'm working though... which is where I come up with some of these crackpot theories.  =)

[SM]

 

[Pvt_Darren_Knight]

I remember reading somewhere that an earthquake had damaged the Delirect and in Alien Isolation Marlowe deactivates the signal

[OpenMaw]

Yes, in Aliens seismic activity has damaged the Derelict (causing one of the arms to crack and fall to the ground.)

This was done, as I recall, because the actual Derelict model itself was falling to pieces, so they just worked that into the plot.

[SM]

Pretty sure the script talked about a rip in the hull.

[Local Trouble]

Quite.  More specifically, a "twisted gash."

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Aliens.html

[FenGiddel]

From Ash's readings, LV was very close to young, infantile Earth during its evolution. Its rock, lava based (as is Earth), reminiscent of Earth during its early evolution, with recognizable gas mixture (such as Nitrogen, currently constituting 80% of Earths atmosphere, and has many common compounds with oxygen and hydrogen, or like argon, which is the third most common gas in Earths atmosphere). Its still primordial. It would be a PERFECT place to terraform, since all it needs is to speed up the process by pumping the right mixture of gases and oxygen into the atmosphere, to turn it into Earth. Once its atmosphere is fully stabilized and the planetoid is developed, theres plenty of things that could be mined such as minerals, metals, even oil. Ash never says theres nothing to mine there, he even mentions methane which is used as fuel. He seems surprised when he gets the readings.

Great stuff!

The Planetoid, and its various iterations, fascinates me, especially since its size could have surprising implications:

1,200 km (745 mi) [the movie, novelization and screenplay; this would be roughly the size of Pluto's moon, Charon.]

12,201 km (7,581 mi) [Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual; roughly the size of Venus]

From my elementary grasp of astrophysics, for a 1,200 km orb to have the gravity this one does would seem to imply a greater density, possibly lucrative heavy metals, supporting previous comments about its value for mining, but also opening up inventive reasons for that apparently artificial density. A larger one (Venus-sized) would be maybe less mysterious.

Or maybe that's been resolved in the Expanded Universe, of which I am largely ignorant but willing to join the fray.

[SM]

Nah, the size isn't touched upon beyond ADF's vague reference (if you can call it that) to Parker and Brett going off prospecting for heavy metals instead of doing repairs.

I think in the Warren Alien magazine they quoted the size as 1200m.  Not sure if it was a typo for miles or metres.

[Xenomrph]

From Ash's readings, LV was very close to young, infantile Earth during its evolution. Its rock, lava based (as is Earth), reminiscent of Earth during its early evolution, with recognizable gas mixture (such as Nitrogen, currently constituting 80% of Earths atmosphere, and has many common compounds with oxygen and hydrogen, or like argon, which is the third most common gas in Earths atmosphere). Its still primordial. It would be a PERFECT place to terraform, since all it needs is to speed up the process by pumping the right mixture of gases and oxygen into the atmosphere, to turn it into Earth. Once its atmosphere is fully stabilized and the planetoid is developed, theres plenty of things that could be mined such as minerals, metals, even oil. Ash never says theres nothing to mine there, he even mentions methane which is used as fuel. He seems surprised when he gets the readings.

Great stuff!

The Planetoid, and its various iterations, fascinates me, especially since its size could have surprising implications:

1,200 km (745 mi) [the movie, novelization and screenplay; this would be roughly the size of Pluto's moon, Charon.]

12,201 km (7,581 mi) [Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual; roughly the size of Venus]

From my elementary grasp of astrophysics, for a 1,200 km orb to have the gravity this one does would seem to imply a greater density, possibly lucrative heavy metals, supporting previous comments about its value for mining, but also opening up inventive reasons for that apparently artificial density. A larger one (Venus-sized) would be maybe less mysterious.

Or maybe that's been resolved in the Expanded Universe, of which I am largely ignorant but willing to join the fray.

It's a bit crazier than that - a size of 1200km would mean the entire planet is made of a material so dense that it's not even on the periodic table of elements because it doesn't occur naturally. You wouldn't be able to mine it, not only because of its density, but because it's so unstable that it's got a negligible half-life (incidentally also making it radioactive as shit), and yet somehow the entire planet is made of the stuff. You'd also be able to see the curvature of the horizon with the naked eye.
It would be the scientific find of the century, a paradigm-destroying discovery whose importance would render the Derelict and the Xenomorph negligible by comparison.

The movies don't give us the impression that any of this is the case, and that's because it's far more likely that the scriptwriters for 'Alien' weren't scientists and didn't recognize how comically, impossibly small "1200km" is.

[Local Trouble]

Déjà vu...

If any source, anywhere, bothered to acknowledge how "impossible" a planet that small is, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. A throwaway line where someone says "yeah, tiny LV-426 is made of absurdly-dense Unobtanium, that's why we mine there", literally anything.

Ah, I get it.  It's not that you can't suspend disbelief and accept it, it's that it hasn't been lampshaded to your satisfaction.  So if the WYR had made a passing reference to the oddity of LV-426's gravity for its size and then redacted a portion of the following text, would that have been enough for you?

To be honest, yes. Granted it wouldn't have jived well with other sources (or the movies), which don't lampshade the size in any way, but it would have been a hell of a start.

Just wanted to bring FenGiddel up to speed on this recurring topic.

[FenGiddel]

Much obliged, friend.

[Xenomrph]

Déjà vu...

If any source, anywhere, bothered to acknowledge how "impossible" a planet that small is, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. A throwaway line where someone says "yeah, tiny LV-426 is made of absurdly-dense Unobtanium, that's why we mine there", literally anything.

Ah, I get it.  It's not that you can't suspend disbelief and accept it, it's that it hasn't been lampshaded to your satisfaction.  So if the WYR had made a passing reference to the oddity of LV-426's gravity for its size and then redacted a portion of the following text, would that have been enough for you?

To be honest, yes. Granted it wouldn't have jived well with other sources (or the movies), which don't lampshade the size in any way, but it would have been a hell of a start.

Just wanted to bring FenGiddel up to speed on this recurring topic.

Heck, if a future Ridley Scott Alien-prequel (since apparently he's got more planned) covered it, that'd be fine, too. Have it be an artificially-created Engineer world or something. Like, literally anything would cut it.

[FenGiddel]

(There's a well-researched article over at Valaquen's Strange Shapes website from which the following snippet cometh.)  I have always liked this Dan O'Bannon spin on Alien: "[they] went to where the Old Ones lived, to their very world of origin ... That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones' home-world, and the Alien a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth."

That would be reason enough for the little world to have such bizarre physical qualities, IMHO.

[Xenomrph]

(There's a well-researched article over at Valaquen's Strange Shapes website from which the following snippet cometh.)  I have always liked this Dan O'Bannon spin on Alien: "[they] went to where the Old Ones lived, to their very world of origin ... That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones' home-world, and the Alien a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth."

That would be reason enough for the little world to have such bizarre physical qualities, IMHO.

Just seems weird that no one comments on it, and the on-screen evidence contradicts the allegedly small size. I mean, shit, Weyland Yutani sets up a colony on the planet as if it's another routine operation.

I think O'Bannon was speaking more in thematic/tonal terms anyway, rather than being literal.