Yeah, I understand your concern. I remember that in the second book, it was stated that it'd take 40 years to get to Earth from the edge of the Human Sphere.
Maybe if Lebbon made the Sphere larger and his ships faster than the ones so far. That would've worked a bit better.
I did like the idea that the ships took ages to get to places, it kept with the Alien theme of space travel being difficult and costly, and even long (even if it just takes months, that's still ages), but he made our territories too small and ships even slower than the Sulaco.
I like how the first book made it seem like humanity caught up with Predators mostly, being almost equal and all. Then the second book slowly casts doubts on this as you are shown Marines struggling against the Rage while Yautja ships come and lend a big help here and there.
Then the third book completely throws it in your face how still behind the Predators we are technologically... and the ending
Spoiler
only adds more salt to that wound as most of our progress is demolished back by a couple of centuries. While they get themselves a nice Rage Warp Drive to probably reverse engineer.
Also those Goldilocks worlds such as Addison Prime and Weaver's World makes me wonder, have Engineers seeded them?
Weaver's World has
Spoiler
spiders that weave massive webs (hence how it got the name), and also a wolf-like creature that got domesticated by human colonists (as no alien life such as actual dogs were allowed on the world). It also even wags its tail when happy and behaves pretty much like a dog.There's also some birds too, hinting that this world could've had dinosaur like creatures possibly in the past as birds are basically modern dinosaurs. Maybe this world had a similar evolutionary path for some of its creatures. The only truly alien thing were the tentacled whales I think, we didn't get a good glimpse on it, just that it had a blowhole like a whale, was huge and snatched birds from above water with tentacles.
I think there were other animals mentioned in previous books that seemed quite Earth-like but I can't remember.
I remember the old EU had some alien but familiar creatures, like one of the comics with Machiko Noguchi shows a monkey like thing. Also the world in AvP-2 whith Jockey ruins has alien animals that have DNA strikingly similar to Earth life according to the datapads you can read. I know these were long before Prometheus, it's just an observation I made that I found really interesting and thought I'd add.
Although it shouldn't be too surprising to see Earth-like life on other worlds in this franchise when you consider the similarities between humans and Predators. So other worlds can have dog like things and bird like things etc.
Also Predxeno, regarding your criticism on the Marines using infrared to track Aliens.
Don't forget that their suits have their own tracking systems too, they highlight enemies and also which targets to shoot so you and your comrades don't shoot the same thing.
Plus, in the third book, they only activated infrared when lights got blown out or when too much smoke clouded the area. So they probably weren't doing it for the Xenos, but to see better in the environment.
