Derelict - full of eggs or docked to another structure?

[Xenomrph]

This came up on another forum I'm on. I'll just quote the post:

When we look at Alien as a standalone film, there is little evidence that the tropical cave is part of a ship. It's close to the Jockey room, and the wall patterns are similar, but that's about it.

Instead, there are multiple clues to the contrary: Kane doesn't see any entrance or exit, besides a hole in the ceiling. Kane states outright that he doesn't believe it's part of the ship; he believes it to be too far down, below the ground, and we don't see any reason why he'd be wrong about this. When we're shown a wide shot of the chamber, it is genuinely much too large to be part of the ship. Like, even accounting for the elastic scale of movies, the entire ship would need to be hollow and still be larger on the inside than the outside. The matte painting also shows that the cave bends off into the distance with an S-shape. The ship itself is U-shaped, and curves steeply upwards at the tips.

I can understand this conclusion, and it ties into both Prometheus (which has underground structures) and the original movie concept of the egg silo being a separate structure.

I'm not sure I fully agree with it, I kind of go back and forth on it.

Thoughts?

[Acid_Reign161]

I think it's another one of those moments where Prometheus / Covenant did more damage than good. Until their release, it was accepted that it was the inside of the ship, and the scaling could be written off in the same way as seeing the scale of the Jockey when using the children actors to make it look bigger vs seeing the actual actors over its body. Now? It kind of *has* to be a structure beneath the ship, based upon the holo map of the Juggernaut in Prometheus (showing there is no such compartment) and Covenant for showing the tiny cargo hold David stands in before bombing the planet with the pathogen.

This leaves us two possibilities; either the Juggernaut is considerably smaller than the derelict on LV426 (very possible!) or we roll with the original scrip for Alien that shows that the Juggernaut is actually sitting above an underground structure (only problem with this is that, yet again, Prometheus puts a spike in that wheel- the planetoid LV426 doesn't conform with any Earth-like planet we've seen the Engineers involved in - and as seen in LV233, they have the ability to generate artificial atmospheres suitable for human life which last for (at least) thousands of years unattended, leading us to believe the derelict was a crash (Ripley confirms this, claiming in the hearing at Gateway that it was not from there).

Short version, it's the ships hold if you ignore Prometheus and Covenant (I have no problem with either of those movies, but if it came to a choice of preserving the original trilogy, I'd happily knock them to 'expanded media' category and enjoy them in the same way I do with reading Dark Horse comics) 😊👍

[Xenomrph]

If I remember right, SM's vehicles page on his timeline website has the Juggernaut as substantially larger than the Derelict, but I don't think he explains his calculations on that.

[Acid_Reign161]

If I remember right, SM's vehicles page on his timeline website has the Juggernaut as substantially larger than the Derelict, but I don't think he explains his calculations on that.

Juggernaut (Prometheus / Covenant) larger than Derelict (Alien / Aliens)? That'd be a hard sell for me personally..not only in the size of the hold, but based upon the pilots room/chair etc too..same size is hard to imagine as is, but if one were larger than the other I'd have to roll the opposite with the derelict being the larger of the two (I'd be keen to see how that was calculated though!) 😊

[SiL]

The Juggernaut is a different shape anyway. They made it rounder so it would roll.

Regardless of the prequels and anything else, it's part of the ship. It's movie geography.

[Acid_Reign161]

The Juggernaut is a different shape anyway. They made it rounder so it would roll.

Regardless of the prequels and anything else, it's part of the ship. It's movie geography.

Agreed - The way I always viewed 'Alien', the crew enter through one of the three openings, and then traverse on a steep upwards incline - the pilot chair being on the top level, explaining Kane's decent to the eggs below - but that still would entail the derelict being *gigantic* (which to be honest, is how I always viewed it, with like you say some "movie geography" involved). The problem only really occurs if we are to believe the Juggernaut is of (roughly) equal size... (which I don't believe it is, personally).

[SiL]

Also the vehicles page in question. The Derelict gets a proper rundown but the Juggernaut is just an image of ships scales. It's not substantially bigger so much as substantially longer.

My guess is the sizing is based on its comparison to the Prometheus, which is easier to work out the size of.

[Acid_Reign161]

Also the vehicles page in question. The Derelict gets a proper rundown but the Juggernaut is just an image of ships scales. It's not substantially bigger so much as substantially longer.

My guess is the sizing is based on its comparison to the Prometheus, which is easier to work out the size of.

Thanks for the link! I'll check it out! 😊👍

[𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯]

This came up on another forum I'm on. I'll just quote the post:

When we look at Alien as a standalone film, there is little evidence that the tropical cave is part of a ship. It's close to the Jockey room, and the wall patterns are similar, but that's about it.

The wall patterns aren't similar, it's exactly the same. The Jockey chamber walls were recycled for the egg chamber. Originally the egg chamber would have been a separate structure on which the derelict ship had landed, but in order to save costs, it became part of the ship.

Decision to merge the egg chamber with ship was made after the script was finished.

[oduodu]

just by way of speculating see the juggernaut as a living entity grown to correct size and then just like the alien it is biomechanized to have metal inserted. i further speculate that the derelict is a juggernaut that after crashing on lv 426 the warp drives created a 3d warp in space that makes the interior far bigger than it appears from the outside. returning to its biological nature this warp forced its way into the surface of the planet and eventually formed an seemingly underground cavern. could be that the warp caused time to freeze to an extent and in other ways exellerated it causing biological dead appearence. maybe pulling some ancient lovecaraftian lifeforce from a dimension linked with it.

[SiL]

Decision to merge the egg chamber with ship was made after the script was finished.

It's in the script. Condensing the pyramid and derelict (which were nowhere near each other) was a fairly early decision to condense the first half of the story.

[O_Intelligence]

Presumably the egg chamber is part of the ship unless Ridley decides otherwise in future, and we're to ignore the visual dimensional disparities with the Space Jockey's chamber (as with the use of children suiting up as Dallas and co in order to make environments appear more epic in scale).  However, I've always liked both the speculative possibilities - not necessarily with either being the actuality, though - that either (1) the chamber is actually a cave, or (2) the dimensions of chambers and things with the Derelict are inexplicably and very... alien.  What we see is perhaps enough for me, minus perhaps a teasing allusion from Kane to the dimensions ostensibly being weird.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Intelligently put.