Subject:
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Re: Alien and gravity
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Wed, 18 Apr 2001 17:05:25 GMT
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Viewed:
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109 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Dave Schuler writes:
> I just saw Aliens again this weekend, and I have another question. Why
> does a ship the size of New Jersey (or whatever its size--it's really big,
> though) only hold a staff of a dozen marines? Much of the motivation for
> putting people in hypersleep is to save life support (and boredom, of
> course), so what's the rest of the ship for? It's a battleship, I imagine,
> so it could house massive weapons and propulsion systems, but these weren't
> needed (and, I would suggest, there was no clear reason to think they
> *might* have been needed, since there was no indication of an invading,
> largescale alien force, or they would have sent more than a dozen grunts!)
> Dramatically, the reason there are only a dozen soldiers is so that they
> can be presented with the "who'll pilot the second drop ship" conundrum, but
> even this doesn't explain the huge ship. Why not send a smaller, faster
> vessel, on which you could still stock sufficient weaponry?
I'd always understood it (aside from the dramatic necessities of the plot
line) as a logical extension of the colonial marine mentality of "be
prepared". It may well be more economical in the long run to send a ship
that can do 95% of what might need doing even if you're only expecting to
have to drop an APC and shoot some bugs. You never know when you'll have to
take off & nuke the site from orbit, and you may not have the luxury of
waiting 6 months (or whatever I can't recall the timelines involved) for a
capital ship to show up and do it for you.
Now, why a capital ship doesn't have a flight crew is a completely different
mystery, although the Alien(s) universe does have an established history of
mostly automated ships.
James
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Alien and gravity
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| (...) That's true, and a good point. For consistency's sake, I guess we could posit that the automated ships aren't sufficiently savvy to drop from orbit and land in hostile environments without some sort of ground-based guidance, but even this (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Alien and gravity
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| (...) The ship and crew are full of gravity throughout the movie; it's a grave situation. (I apologize.) (...) I just saw Aliens again this weekend, and I have another question. Why does a ship the size of New Jersey (or whatever its size--it's (...) (24 years ago, 18-Apr-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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