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Cessna posted:Has anyone done any sort of EU fiction in the Alien universe further ahead in the future? I know Resurrection was set a few hundred years after Alien; has anyone done anything after that? Technically yes? I can think of a couple books that are post-Resurrection (2381) but it’s been a long time since I read them. https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Aliens:_Original_Sin https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Alien:_Sea_of_Sorrows https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Alien_vs._Predator:_Armageddon I think Armageddon is set in the 2600s? Or at least that’s what the most reliable fan timeline says, but I haven’t fact-checked it. Also it’s up in the air if any of the books are still “canon”. The AvP one arguably isn’t, just because it’s AvP. Original Sin also featured the Space Jockeys before Prometheus came out, so that’s arguably retconned. But hey, it’s all fiction anyway, it’s easy to head-canon it.
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Jan 18, 2024 18:30
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Convert to a WH40K campaign without telling them. Hell, just run Space Hulk.
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Jan 18, 2024 19:01
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Xenomrph posted:I think Armageddon is set in the 2600s? Or at least that’s what the most reliable fan timeline says, but I haven’t fact-checked it. Interesting, I'll check that out, thanks! Shanty posted:Convert to a WH40K campaign without telling them. 
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Jan 18, 2024 22:20
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Shanty posted:Convert to a WH40K campaign without telling them.  Xenomrph posted:Originally in ‘Alien’ the crew was meant to find their food rations raided (presumably by the chestburster) to explain how it got so big, and it’s fine to presume that scene happened “off camera” in the movie. Weyland-Yutani is a mining and terraforming company. They don't want to capture them for weapons research they just want to build better atmospheric processors. Ripley didn't save worlds. She robbed us of them.
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Jan 19, 2024 00:13
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Splicer posted:
Also Aliens are silicon-based (which makes it even crazier that they’re able to absorb host genetics). Also WY has its fingers in a ton of pies, but I get your point.
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Jan 19, 2024 02:06
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CelticPredator posted:David created the first alien ever in the history of the universe No, the Engineers created the first-ever alien by seeding the planet Earth with life billions of years ago such that humans eventually evolved. David merely finished the job.
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Jan 19, 2024 19:46
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Xenomrph posted:This isn’t a too-out-there idea considering facehuggers are able to magically filter whatever atmosphere is available and produce whatever atmosphere the host needs to breathe (such as when one breached Kane’s helmet). I remember seeing one theory that basically the xenos were living batteries and could “feed” off electricity, only needing organic matter for hosts and some supplementary nutrients. Don’t know how plausible that is, but it would at least be one more trait compelling them to go to areas inhabited by intelligent life, which is a virtue in a bioweapon.
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Jan 19, 2024 19:56
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I'd like to think that all of these portrayals of how the Xenomorph biology works are true at the same time. It's just that hyper-adabtable and it's one more reason for any bioresearch department would sell all their grandmothers for a chance to study it.
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Jan 19, 2024 20:46
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The xenomorph drains soul energy from its victims, leaving their bodies depleted of phosphorus. Wait, hold on
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Jan 19, 2024 20:55
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MadDogMike posted:I remember seeing one theory that basically the xenos were living batteries and could “feed” off electricity, only needing organic matter for hosts and some supplementary nutrients. Don’t know how plausible that is, but it would at least be one more trait compelling them to go to areas inhabited by intelligent life, which is a virtue in a bioweapon. Personally I think the "bio weapons division" interest would have more to do with the xeno as an example of materials science and chemistry and poo poo than just air dropping a bunch of eggs. Using them as is is like trying to knife fight with a hand grenade. One smuggler touches down then takes off for Gateway or whatever and you're in blowback city. Then again we're talking about the MIC and corpos so they probably are that short sighted.
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Jan 19, 2024 20:58
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Owlbear Camus posted:Personally I think the "bio weapons division" interest would have more to do with the xeno as an example of materials science and chemistry and poo poo than just air dropping a bunch of eggs. It’s a little of both, the WY Report book has a bunch of proposed materials/chemistrty xeno applications outside of just dropping eggs, but I can’t recall what they are off the top of my head.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:02
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Xenomrph posted:Also Aliens are silicon-based MadDogMike posted:I remember seeing one theory that basically the xenos were living batteries and could “feed” off electricity, only needing organic matter for hosts and some supplementary nutrients. Q) Where did the alien get the matter needed to grow so big so fast? Option 1) it's an acid blooded multistage lifeform that jumps out of humans and for all you know it's made of moonbeams and fairy dust and it got bigger because the space fairies put more dust on it : cool, cool Option 2) it's an acid blooded multistage lifeform that jumps out of humans and it got bigger because it ate all their food and for all you know it's made of moonbeams and fairy dust but given the former it's probably a carbon based organic : cool, cool Option 3) it's an acid blooded multistage lifeform that jumps out of humans and it's a silicon bas- : OK here's reason 1 of ? why this both undermines and is inconsistent with the events otherwise depicted in the film-
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Jan 19, 2024 21:03
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Owlbear Camus posted:Personally I think the "bio weapons division" interest would have more to do with the xeno as an example of materials science and chemistry and poo poo than just air dropping a bunch of eggs. This seems like what the EU might be starting to lean toward as well. Aliens: Dark Descent spoiler: the top-ranking WY exec you meet rants about how study of the xenomorph will revolutionize human knowledge across a multitude of fields, portraying it more as an example of exotic scientific principles at work rather than just a potential bioweapon
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Jan 19, 2024 21:06
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Slashrat posted:This seems like what the EU might be starting to lean toward as well. And yet even then the story breaks around the fact that it's the alien-as-monster they care about and not the ancient-rear end alien city they are excavating underground full of ancient-rear end tech.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:21
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Xenomorphs can't be silicon-based, since we're not, and xenomorphs are just humans taken to their logical conclusion. Also, being silicon-based isn't, like, good or useful, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nbsFS_rfqM
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Jan 19, 2024 21:58
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Slashrat posted:This seems like what the EU might be starting to lean toward as well. There’s a “corporate” module being planned for the RPG (presumably so you can play as corporate stooges or PMCs or whatever), I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of stuff gets covered there. Also I talked with the RPG’s author and he said the ATAX armor from the Kenner toyline is going to get incorporated into a future expansion.
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Jan 19, 2024 23:45
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Xenomrph posted:Also Aliens are silicon-based No, they're not. The specific line in the film is that "uh, I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon". Polysaccharides are carbohydrates - which, as the term implies, are made of carbon and hydrogen (and oxygen). An outer layer of polysaccharides implies chitin, like in the exoskeletons of Earth's insects (among many other things). It's extremely common and familiar. Also, note the specific wording: the creature sheds his cells and replaces them with (polarized) silicon. That's right: the creature sheds the entire cells - intricate, functional, carbon-based cells - and replaces them with chunks of a crystaline element. As Ferrinus' video helpfully notes, the silicon would then turn into some kind of silicate when it contacts the oxygen in the atmosphere of the ship. (Someone else might be able to explain what the polarization accomplishes.) In other words, the alien crab is a carbon-based lifeform that is able to spontaneously grow a thin layer of rock all over its body.
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Jan 20, 2024 01:43
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:No, they're not.
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Jan 20, 2024 09:57
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Splicer posted:Yeah we're not calcium based life forms. For examples of carbon-based life forms that incorporate silica into their biology you can look at grass (i.e. phytoliths), sponges (i.e. megascleres)… really all kinds of stuff. (And, to avoid going too hard into the “xenomorphs are bugs” deal, it should also be noted that there’s chitin in fungi, squids, and other things as well.)
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Jan 20, 2024 17:50
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I’m almost positive the “aliens are silicon-based”thing comes up in the expanded universe, and in reference to the adult Aliens specifically. I’m going to do some digging on where that comes from, my mind could have fabricated it entirely from whole cloth, who knows! Edit-- doing a little digging on another forum and back in 2011 even I myself argued that they're not purely silicon-based, so hey I guess maybe my brain fabricated it from whole-cloth. I swear the expanded universe has adult Aliens being silicon based, but I'm doing more research. I'm okay with being wrong! Xenomrph fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 20, 2024 18:10
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As a kid I always thought it was weird and creepy that they didn't seem to eat, and that they grew quickly. I assumed they absorbed nutrients out of the air or could just chew on anything like rock or metal and convert it into whatever passes for energy for them, and hibernate basically perpetually. I always imagined that one alien blasted out of the airlock just curling into a ball and floating for eons until it somehow ran into new victims. My brother and I used to theorize that the Queen alien was just one that had time to grow to its full size, while all the rest of them are dead soon after birth but the queen was the original from Newt's dad. Mostly the movies seem to go out of their way showing them not eating people when they probably could. - Aliens has human corpses rotting away in the hive and you figure hundreds of Aliens would chow down on them if they liked eating people. - Alien Resurrection they find the rooms full of chestbursted corpses but they are otherwise untouched, and the aliens grew into big boys basically overnight, since the marine officer only allows the pirates a weekend or something, which involves getting everyone hugged, grown, burst, and grown all within the time limit. Alien 3 I always took it to be playing with its food like it inherited some doggy behaviors. I guess now in the new cut it is a bull but Alien 3 is a mess anyway.
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Jan 20, 2024 19:10
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Watched Aliens on Disney+ this evening because it's been 10 odd years so why not, some refreshed thoughts on the main director's cut scene additions and what I prefer: Ripley's daughter: In. Not quite enough time spent in Act 1 establishing what Ripley has lost so the impact of finding Newt isn't quite there. Seeing the Colonists: Out. Adds nothing to the narrative, takes away from the Burke reveal later on, slows down Act 1 of the film far too much. The automated turrets: In. In theatrical I don't think enough time is spent establishing the efforts the Marines go to fortify the ops centre, which builds up hope they'll be able to hold out. The rest of the changes I could take or leave, they're minor stuff. Other things I noticed: the first run into the refinery is a masterpiece of 80's sci-fi action. No option to throw CGI aliens everywhere so Cameron has to use quick cuts and the narrow lens of the in-universe shoulder cameras to create the sense of this frantic firefight when actually you see very little. Films should have more of this. I consider Bishop as a bit of a failed character - it's interesting that when they arrive at Ops he goes straight to dissecting the Alien specimens with Ash-like focus, but then he completely disappears for the next 30 minutes, only reappearing briefly to volunteer to disappear again for another 30 minutes or so. It's difficult to remember he's in the film for much of it, much less hold any tension over whether he is/isn't going to betray Ripley at some point.
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Jan 20, 2024 20:12
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Alien 3 I always took it to be playing with its food like it inherited some doggy behaviors. I guess now in the new cut it is a bull but Alien 3 is a mess anyway. I think the behavior works better with the dog host, though.
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Jan 20, 2024 20:37
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Alchenar posted:Watched Aliens on Disney+ this evening because it's been 10 odd years so why not, some refreshed thoughts on the main director's cut scene additions and what I prefer:
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Jan 20, 2024 20:52
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Xenomrph posted:It’s a little of both, the WY Report book has a bunch of proposed materials/chemistrty xeno applications outside of just dropping eggs, but I can’t recall what they are off the top of my head. I mean, the fact you can get one of them born from just about any life form we know has downright spectacular implications for genetics and other biological sciences (particularly if the relatively new "the facehuggers spray some variant of the Prometheus black goo in the host to generate the chestburster" lore holds; put that stuff in the hands of biologists not stupid enough to pet an alien death-snakes (who aren't psycho androids either) and it'd make the biological revolution from inventing PCR look downright tame). Xenomrph posted:I’m almost positive the “aliens are silicon-based”thing comes up in the expanded universe, and in reference to the adult Aliens specifically. I’m going to do some digging on where that comes from, my mind could have fabricated it entirely from whole cloth, who knows! Maybe it's related to the "biomechanical" descriptions I've seen thrown around in various Alien media. Funnily enough, even as someone trained as a biologist, I don't mind all the ludicrous stuff thrown around about the Alien's biology simply because making them more incomprehensible just plain works better for the horror elements (also in-universe the actual scientists all seem to be equally flustered by all this stuff, so it's not simply writers being clueless about science as usual but a deliberate theme of "this thing killing us makes absolutely no sense").
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Jan 21, 2024 03:30
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MadDogMike posted:I mean, the fact you can get one of them born from just about any life form we know has downright spectacular implications for genetics and other biological sciences (particularly if the relatively new "the facehuggers spray some variant of the Prometheus black goo in the host to generate the chestburster" lore holds; put that stuff in the hands of biologists not stupid enough to pet an alien death-snakes (who aren't psycho androids either) and it'd make the biological revolution from inventing PCR look downright tame). The later Expanse books go quite heavily into that idea.
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Jan 21, 2024 11:35
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Xenomrph posted:I’m almost positive the “aliens are silicon-based”thing comes up in the expanded universe, and in reference to the adult Aliens specifically. I’m going to do some digging on where that comes from, my mind could have fabricated it entirely from whole cloth, who knows! E: it may have just said 'silicon-based shell" or something Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Jan 21, 2024 |
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Jan 21, 2024 12:05
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Mr. Grapes! posted:As a kid I always thought it was weird and creepy that they didn't seem to eat, and that they grew quickly. I mean, that’s obviously deliberate; the creatures in the movies are presented as being like evil spirits - especially in Alien 1 (where the idea is that Kane’s ghost is haunting the ship), and Alien 3 (where the alien is, arguably, literally a ghost). The trick is to simply not treat that metaphorical presentation as ‘canonical’ - like there’s an objectively-existing creature that has the ‘anatomy’ of a ghost. In Alien 1, the alien crab is clearly described as just a carbon-based lifeform that incorporates silicon into what could be an exoskeleton. The only big fanciful sci-fi conceit is that it’s full of “molecular acid”, which is a liquid that doesn’t really resemble any known acid. (Note that the stuff is never even confirmed to be “molecular acid”, so it’s doubly unknown). But some folks, like the author of the ACMTM, begin with the acid and work backwards from there. So, like, you google “what is the strongest acid”, conclude that that’s what the alien is made of, and then use that as a jumping-off point to start speculating about fluorine-based life (or whatever) when Ash already said it’s carbon-based. So it’s weird! But otherwise, in Alien 1, we don’t actually have much of a strict timeline for how quickly the alien grows. Time is compressed in the film, in such a way that the trip to the moon takes roughly a full day. Between Kane’s death and Brett’s death, enough time passes for them to to do a preliminary search of the ship, hold a makeshift funeral for Kane, build all the cattle-prods and motion-sensor devices, and begin a second (more thorough) search. And that’s presumably not all they they’ve been doing; the film has already skipped over many points where the characters would have been eating and sleeping. At this point in the narrative, they also don’t have a huge sense of urgency; the thing is still just a weird little snake. Roughly three days from embryo to maturity is extremely fast, of course, but not inconceivable, provided there’s enough food available. And a spaceship going on a 10-month journey is going to need a significant supply of food for these six people (and cat!), in case the hypersleep pods ever fail. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 06:30
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Like WY would care enough to supply a pod malfunction. They probably have enough supplies to last a week.
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Jan 22, 2024 06:38
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Invalid Validation posted:Like WY would care enough to supply a pod malfunction. They probably have enough supplies to last a week. The whole point of the cryosleep is so they don’t have to load up supplies for a real-time journey, there’s no way the Nostromo actually had like a year’s worth of supplies in case the 7 people onboard couldn’t sleep the whole way there.
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Jan 22, 2024 07:19
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Okay but here’s my question: how fast is Nostromo going that it only takes a year to get from wherever they were mining back to Earth? Because it has to be several times the speed of light, which would require some kind of space-warping technology, and yet there is nothing to suggest they’re doing anything other than traveling on inertia from rocket thrust.
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Jan 22, 2024 12:38
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Oh, just use your imagination, quit asking for everything to be spelled out
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Jan 22, 2024 12:40
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Apollodorus posted:Okay but here’s my question: how fast is Nostromo going that it only takes a year to get from wherever they were mining back to Earth?
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Jan 22, 2024 12:54
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You're in the science fiction board now! I want to know exactly how fast the Nostromo travels and the plausible means by which it generates that thrust by the end of the day, or I'm going to start handing out sixers like like a wounded alien spraying spurious acid blood.
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Jan 22, 2024 13:37
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Apollodorus posted:Okay but here’s my question: how fast is Nostromo going that it only takes a year to get from wherever they were mining back to Earth? FTL travel is absolutely a thing in the Aliens universe, but kinda gets glossed over because it's largely irrelevant to the stories being told iirc, aside from the odd mention that being outside of cryosleep for extended periods of time during FTL travel does harmful things to a person's mental health. Like artificial gravity, it's one those Physics/Engineering questions that humanity a few hundred years into the future has just Solved. e: The Alien RPG gives some rough numbers for distances that can be covered in a given amount time, probably, but time required is likely always on the scale of "anything time-sensitive is going to be long-over by the time you arrive". e2: here's a snippet from the core rules: "When they were first deployed a hundred and fifty years ago, FTL engines could impel a starship such as a Heliades class Space Exploration Vehicle at 10 to 15 times the speed of light. Even though modern ships can travel from 50 to upwards of 700 times FTL, that still means it can take weeks or even years to travel the whole of charted space." Slashrat fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 13:42
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Breaking my immersion realising that the nuclear powered Nostromo would still take decades to make an interstellar trip. 
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Jan 22, 2024 13:44
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Aliens takes place in the Event Horizon universe and they put people in hypersleep to stop them going mad and tearing their eyes out
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Jan 22, 2024 13:47
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I mean yeah it’s not relevant to the story I was just curious.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:12
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Aliens takes place in the Event Horizon universe and they put people in hypersleep to stop them going mad and tearing their eyes out C'mon there's no way the Jaunt is that long.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:44
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Xenomrph posted:The whole point of the cryosleep is so they don’t have to load up supplies for a real-time journey, there’s no way the Nostromo actually had like a year’s worth of supplies in case the 7 people onboard couldn’t sleep the whole way there. The Nostromo is tugging 20 million tonnes of mineral ore, plus an entire refinery complex, plus itself. They could easily fit the roughly 10 tonnes of lovely emergency rations needed for the journey. And, if you’re foolishly worried about the cost of the rations, that food would then only ever be used in an emergency. Storage space is only an issue for the smaller escape pods. (In terms of resources, I wager that it’d be cheaper to just feed the crew for a year). An actual reason for the pods could be that lightspeed travel is hazardous, but the pods don’t appear to offer many (or any) real protective qualities. The crew are laying down, unsecured, in big glass tubes. So, my guess is that the pods exist for the ‘convenience’ of the crew, so they can skip the ten-months-per-trip journey in a way that also allows the company to reduce wages.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:56
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