Quote from: Local Trouble on Sep 16, 2016, 09:19:03 PM
Quote from: Xenomrph on Sep 16, 2016, 04:23:31 AMYou'd think any of the movies (or anything else) would indicate that, then. Even a throwaway line like "oh, another world made of Unobtanium". But instead we don't just get nothing, we get information that directly contradicts it: a hundred colonists sent to mine something conventional, and a planet described as having "a metal core".
When was it ever stated that the colonists were there to mine something conventional? Why do you assume that a planetoid full of unobtanium would be any more noteworthy among a crew of 22nd century space truckers than the miracle of FTL space travel is? What you and I consider amazing today could be relatively mundane to our descendants a hundred years from now.
There's a pretty radical difference between man-made technology becoming commonplace over time (be it powered flight, FTL, SCUBA gear, the smartphone, whatever) and an apparently naturally-occurring phenomenon that flat-out shouldn't exist.
A better example is the Alien itself - there's a reason why people pursue it for study/capture/exploitation so obsessively (be it in the movies, or the EU) and that's because it's a seemingly natural phenomenon that defies all expectations or explanations. It's noteworthy simply by existing, and calls attention to itself because of it.
Likewise, a microplanet with gravity comparable to earth would be similarly noteworthy, but none of the movies or anything else even pay lip-service to how remarkable this would be, not even in the slightest. 'Alien' makes intercepting an extraterrestrial broadcast seem like just something that could happen to anyone, but it's still an unusual and noteworthy event and the Nostromo crew reacts accordingly and acknowledges that it's not the norm.
You're the one claiming LV-426 is made of a magical mystery material, where's the evidence to support it? Why did no characters in any of the movies even mention the planet's remarkable composition? Why did none of the characters mention the planet's size when the Nostromo was landing on it, since landing on small objects is inherently risky? Where is the specialized, heretofore-impossible mining equipment you would use to mine this mystery material that no one bothers to mention (and, as pointed out, would be so dense that you wouldn't be able to mine it, not to mention its infinitesimal half-life)? Where is the radiation shielding to protect colonists or explorers from the ridiculous radiation the planet would be giving off? A small planet made of such a mystery material wouldn't have seismic activity, geysers, or plate tectonics, and yet we see all of these in both movies - how do you address that? 1200km is a third the size of the moon, the curvature of the horizon would be apparent even with the various rock outcroppings - and yet it's not. Why not? The WYR (or anything else) doesn't bother to mention that LV-426 is made of anything out of the ordinary, no matter how "commonplace" it might be in the future - why is that?
Like, I'm getting the vibe that you acknowledge that for LV-426 to be so small, it would have to be made of something weird. But I'm not sure you grasp
how weird it would have to be, or the ramifications of it. I've mentioned it before, but I highly recommend the book 'Solaris' - the whole thing is about the discovery of an "impossible" planet and the ramifications it has on the scientific community, and on humanity at large.
If any source, anywhere, bothered to acknowledge how "impossible" a planet that small is, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
A throwaway line where someone says "yeah, tiny LV-426 is made of absurdly-dense Unobtanium, that's why we mine there",
literally anything.
Shit, have the planet be an artificial construct (be it by Space Jockeys/Engineers, or whoever, doesn't matter), then you can handwave the density as "magical technology"
and you get the added awe and mystery of an entire planet that's been artificially created.
Like, there's ways to make the tiny size work, but none of the movies or anything else bother to even acknowledge it (and the CMTM outright addressed it by fixing it). Yeah sure you can say "we are beholden to the source material", but that doesn't mean source material is infallible, or can't fall victim to bad writing or bad science.
It just seems like a lot of bending over backwards and jumping through hoops in order to preserve a throwaway line from a deleted scene, spoken by a fallible human, and contradicted by the visual evidence of two movies.
But hey, to each their own I guess.
