Quote from: Guan Thwei 1992 on Nov 06, 2015, 08:21:51 PM
Why not use Aliens for the sake of variety?
They do the same thing a biological or chemical agent would, exterminate the populace.
Much less efficient. You'd have to transport a huge number to overwhelm most prepared defences. A single Alien is larger than a man. Warheads are much smaller - and can be transported a lot quicker.
Might as well ask yourself why a company doesn't do the same thing, right
now, with cloned tigers. Can you imagine all the logistical problems involved?
QuoteAnd a Neutron bomb will destroy the city, what if you're too lazy to rebuild? It's a lot simpler to clean up a room than having to rebuild the entire building (after clearing up the rubble as well.)
Neutron bombs can be very low-yield. The whole point of them, back in the Cold War, was to do
exactly this: Release a huge burst of radiation in a city, kill everyone and leave the infrastructure intact to take over. The radiation disperses surprisingly quickly.
Different to thermonuclear war, which would literally vaporise everything.
QuoteAnd bio-weapons can contaminate an area, look at what happened to the Engineers themselves in their own facility. And in a deleted scene in Prometheus, Captain Janek tells Vickers about a bio-weapon breakout somewhere on Earth, it was in a desert because just like the Engineers, we weren't stupid enough to build it in a populated area, and yet the whole facility got contaminated due to a leak and had to be destroyed along with everyone in it.
It's a lot safer and cleaner to just use an army of acid bleeding scary looking Aliens completely under your thrall rather than a potentially mutative virus that could harbour unpredictable results if you plan on settling the area afterwards.
Biological agents, sure - now. By the time the films are happening, it stands to reason that technology would allow them to be modified to only target certain people or burn out after a designated time. That's stuff which has been worked on since at least the nineties, if not earlier.
But even there, you still have neutron bombs - or chemical warfare. In fact, '
Aliens' show that the Colonial Marines seem to take along not just nuclear weapons, but canisters of nerve gas - just for regular scouting missions. There don't seem to be any political problems with authorising them for use.
QuoteAnd like mentioned before, the psychological aspect. Promising your enemy a quick death isn't as scary as promising to send an army of crawling darkness with your name plastered on its head straight to their doorstep.
When it's at the cost of efficiency, what's the point when you already have weapons which achieve the same result much easier? If you're wiping out entire populations, anyone you're terrorising isn't going to live to tell about it.
QuoteBut in the end, I would agree that Aliens aren't the perfect and ultimate weapon like some characters in the EU make it out to be. But damn are they effective when unleashed as a surprise attack.
I guess we'd have to wait for "Alien: Invasion" to find out just how it goes.
Yeah, as I say, I'll withhold my judgement until I read it, but if it's literally a case of just being able to control Aliens, it's no better than General Spears' plan. At least his idea was to use them against other Aliens, though. To reclaim Earth from the Alien by using them against one another. There's a sort of logic there.
But using them against humans and Predators?
Ehhh... We're two species which have access to
really powerful ranged weapons and Aliens can't realistically compete against that. Not if it's open, galactic-wide warfare.
Using an Alien as an
assassin, on the other hand... Now, that's something they'd be very good at. A small number of them locating a specific target, evading defences and killing him/her/it. That's what they excel at in urban environments. Very different to using them as an army of doom.
I could also see their brains and sensory abilities possibly being removed/cloned/farmed and placed in some kind of synthetic contraption, to augment robotic abilities (like a kind of ED-209 with a few Alien components inside).