Quote from: Berend on Oct 16, 2017, 06:08:36 AM
They regenerate small punctures made in their skin ect.
and yet Ash doesn't come closer than ragdolling Ripley around, and gets pummled easily by Lambert and Parker.
and even Bishop the supossed latest model continuity-wise stab himself during the knife scene and it didn't heal.
Did Ridley ever elaborate on that?
Quote from: Paranoid Android on Oct 16, 2017, 08:30:15 AM
They also thought that since those science oriented synthetics are going to be heavily involved in combat, they would need Wolverine's regenerative capabilities.
The prequel androids don't mysteriously heal themselves out of nowhere or have unexplained regenerative abilities - they repair themselves with specialized instruments and biomechanical liquids/adhesives to patch up open wounds (seen in A:C when Walter repairs his wounds after they evacuate Paradise), which is something I assume Bishop did off-screen as well, so it's more than likely Ash and Bishop had access to + were capable of conducting the same level of maintenance themselves. Just because we didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there, so it was in fact a good thing Ridley showed us how androids repair themselves in A:C.
The difference we
see is that the damage inflicted to Ash and Bishop in the movies are too extensive to be patched up, and would require rebuilding entire body parts, which is something you cannot do if you're not in a designated facility, and even then it would take a very long time, too much to believably fit in a movie even if they tried (remember that even Walter can't regrow an arm, let alone Bishop regrowing half his body).
Quote from: SM on Oct 16, 2017, 06:15:33 AM
The A2s were always a bit twitchy.
This. The original movies cleverly imply that older models were more problematic and prone to aggression against humans, which goes against Asimov's laws of robotics, so logically this has been addressed and fixed by the Weyland company. We already see a considerable difference between David and Walter in their willingness to harm humans/allow them to be harmed, which shows that the company indeed improved this aspect. Later models, including Ash and Bishop, were most likely equipped with more efficient combat/aggression inhibitors (think of it as the prefrontal cortex in our own brains) that control how they both perceive and react to hostile behavior from others.
Obviously anything can malfunction, so to answer your concern on why Ash was so easily beaten up by Parker - I hypothesize that Ash's combat inhibitor malfunctioned for an unknown reason (although I suspect it might be due to the conflicting nature of his mission - allowing his human crew to be harmed/killed, which could have seriously messed with his programming and behavioral processes), however - it didn't shut down completely, maintaining at least some level of control over him. So while he was able to fight/attempt to murder someone himself, he still couldn't do it as efficiently as if he might have had with no restraints on his actions at all.
To recap - Ash was constantly held back by his own programming, which was probably haywire at that point, making attack/defense functions faulty and practically useless.
