The it's-a-rich-guy's-flagship concept works only up to a point. When '
Aliens' rolls around, it's more than half a century after even the first film and we're not even shown just a colony, but Gateway, which was a very large in Earth's orbit. Plus, the Sulaco is referred to as "state of the badass art" (not in an ironic way, either; the Colonial Marines are all clearly very confident in what it is capable of).
The Prometheus should be the equivelant to how Howard Hughes' aeroplanes would have seemed in the early 2000s, let alone today.
Plus, all those personal iPad-like gizmos with holography are being very casually used on the Prometheus. No marvelling at them or whatever. Even if one discards how useful it would have been for Brettand Parker, it's ridiculous to look at the hulking great 2D map table in Hadley's Hope (and the APC stuff) and not think it doesn't make sense for nobody to include 3D holography, so that visually depicting different levels make sense. I can believe that maybe personal tablet devices were trashed or cocooned with the colonists, but why doesn't the table simply project something above or around it? Or the APC's monitors?
And then there's Ripley's constant nightmares, which, if dream-monitoring technology had been available, should have at least been mentioned to back her up during her tribunal. They were trying to figure out if she was personally responsible for destroying a massive fortune's-worth of hardware and killing her crewmates, after all!
Such recordings could even have completely exonerated her from guilt and responsibility.
Scott was focused overly on '
Alien' and wanted to simply incorporate things he wasn't able to during that. But it gets really iffy when we just considering the ramifications for the sequel. It just didn't seem to be factored into pre-production.
Which isn't even touching on how weird it gets when looking at the Auriga equipment!
If we get anything too far out and there aren't any inconsistencies with canon, it might be time to bring in the 'unreliable narrator' plot device to explain it. Maybe there'll be a future story where all events of the films are depicted as being corrupted data files being read by someone?
