hello acrediblesource!
I know of the spore idea they had too, though It got ditched fast once Giger got their egg models "up and running"
It was indeed taken directly from lovecraft, just as much more material and ideas they had in store that was later discarded as well, some of which was re-introduced again with Prometheus.
An explanation for why there's only that blue laser over one egg chamber?. If you look at the entire chamber (not just the one under the blue laser) as Kane descends, you will see the rest of the objects that have no blue mist over their chambers are also eggs that are already scattered all around and already open. This always seemed to imply for many of us that when the ship crashed (some other elder folks of my time still think they ship was parked there, and that the chamber is not part of the ship but a cave constructed under the rock), all stasis fields (the blue mist/lasers) but the one we see in alien failed. This also means that hundreds, or maybe thousands depending on how huge the cargo load was facehuggers got loose, not just the one who got the space jockey.
There's also an explanation for the egg creation for those who have doubts about whether Ridley will go down Cameron's queen road or not. We now have the black goo and David experiments, which imo will probably be his way to go this time around. Second, there's the egg morphing thing I never was so particularly fond off, and third the queen, which completely destroys the idea behind the alien as biomechanical engineered weapon. But there's the original and always forgotten first idea that was introduced about the eggs coming from the very Mastermind behind, Giger, which was way before eggmorphing or queen. That was no more and no less than the very Derelict producing them, as an also biomechanical organism. You ever wondered why the Derelict kind of resembles the female reproductive track?.
