Quote from: Jonjamess on May 29, 2023, 07:28:29 PMQuote from: Xenomrph on May 28, 2023, 11:04:47 PMYes, it's behind a mountain range and a good ways from the colony.
No, the movie implies the Derelict is destroyed along with the atmosphere processor and the colony. How do we know it is implied clearly? Because in Alien 3, WY is desperate to capture the dog alien and retrieve the embryo Ripley is carrying. If the Derelict was still intact they would just go there to get some Aliens instead. This is also then further confirmed with Alien Ressurection where they spend how many years trying to clone Ripley to get an Alien. Again if the Derelict was still there why would they bother doing this?
The only bit of Aliens media that states the Derelict did in fact survive the atmosphere processor explosion is the awful video game Colonial Marines which is not at all Canon.
So no the Derelict is not intact after the events of Aliens in terms of the lore.
The colonial Marines Technical Manual has it survive per the method I mentioned, and has a team sent to the derelict concurrently with the events of Alien3.
'Aliens' itself implies nothing about the Derelict's destruction, and in fact implies the opposite by demonstrating that it is quite far from the colony and behind a mountain range (stated in dialogue), which is why the CMTM capitalized on that explanation to have it survive.
The reason given in the lore for why they don't go back in Alien Resurrection is The Big Deletion. Alternately you could say that while WY knew of the Derelict's survival, the US Military (who was running the Auriga operation) did not.
Edit— just for chuckles I checked with Andrew Gaska on how the RPG handles it and the RPG leaves it deliberately open-ended, and "plants the seeds" that it survived.