Headscratchers / Aliens: Colonial Marines

• What on earth is "IMI"? Is it like "Oscar Mike"?
  • It's NATO Phonetic CW Abbreviation for "Repeat, say again". And Oscar Mike? O (Oscar) and M (Mike) when used together indicates that a unit is "On the Move" or sometimes, "On Mission."
• What kind of information did Weyland-Yutani need/want from Hicks? And why would they only take Hicks for questioning and not Ripley, Newt (the sole survivor of the colony) or Bishop (who is their product)?
  • The "Stasis Interrupted" DLC answers this, by showing that Hicks was woken up by colonists from the Legato just before the cryopods were ejected.
• Prior to the beginning of the game, Weyland-Yutani accesses the Sulaco and all of its cryopods (including Ripley herself), kidnaps Hicks, jettisons the cryopods with an infected Ripley inside, pulls the Sulaco back to LV-426, starts Project Origin (breeding xenomorphs with eggs found in the Derelict) and uses the Sulaco as a test hive. Why, then, do they decide to go back for Ripley in Alien3 when (a) they already have plenty of test subjects on LV-426, (b) a live Queen who they've been experimenting on, and (c) access to plenty of eggs in the Derelict? This makes even less sense in the Movie Map Pack DLC, where you can find W-Y equipment strewn all over the Fury 161 facility that has no discernible purpose.
  • The "Stasis Interrupted" DLC rewrites/retcons this by stating that two civilians from the Legato - Herc and Stone - woke Hicks up, and that the ensuing fight with a group of W-Y PMC's caused the cryopods to be jettisoned. However, there's still no explanation for why the Sulaco was towed back over LV-426, especially when it's revealed in the same DLC that the Legato was already involved with construction on Project Origin (and even had xenomorph samples) when they were waylaid to rendezvous with the Sulaco.
  • The facility on Fury 161 was owned by Weyland Yutani. Their logo is clearly visible on establishing shots of the blast furnace. As for why Weyland is so desperate to get Ripley's embryo when he's harvesting eggs from the Derelict, apparently a coherent script is just one of the many things Gearbox failed to slap together in the nine months they spent building the game.
• Why was the Sulaco brought back above LV-426, and why did Weyland-Yutani decide to convert the Sulaco into a xenomorph research lab when it likely isn't equipped or even particularly useful for such an endeavor?
  • It makes sense, using the ship meant less construction time on the planet, and it could be used to move men and materials to and from LV-426, it would have doubled their transport capacity. No logical person would just let the ship go when they could find a use for it at any time, they could always get rid of it later.
  • This makes more sense with the arrival of Stasis Interrupted where it's revealed Weyland-Yutani did have a dedicated research vessel which was lost. So the remaining researchers may have just been making use of what they had.
  • Better question: how was the Sulaco diverted? It's a USCMC ship, not a WY ship. Did the Company just hope the Corps forgot they had an entire ship and half platoon of marines that haven't come back or reported in?
• The game is said to take place seventeen weeks after the events of Aliens. Wasn't the period before stated in the movie seventeen days, not weeks?
  • What are you even talking about? The only mention of that time frame in the film is when everyone is freaking out that a rescue ship wouldn't be coming for them for 17 days.
    • That's more or less it exactly. The marines in this game are those referred to in the movie as arriving in "17 days." So the timeframe doesn't make much sense.
    • Just to clarify to everyone, the 17 days mentioned in the film isn't when they're expecting a rescue. 17 days is how long it would be for the Sulaco and crew to be declared overdue before they could expect a rescue team is sent out. Hudson himself states, "Four more weeks and out." after the group are informed of the atmosphere processor's critical failure, implying that it would have been almost a month before a rescue team would arrive to get them. And before anyone states this, keep in mind that it took two weeks for messages to be sent from the colony and Earth (17 days is two weeks plus three days) as noted in the Special Edition of Aliens, so Earth was expecting to hear a report from the Sulaco transmitted after it's ETA to LV-426. Essentially, after two weeks and three days, if Earth never received a message, they would be declared overdue and a rescue team would be sent shortly after that.
    • That exactly incorrect. Ripley asks "How long after we're declared overdue can we expect a rescue?" and Hicks replies "Seventeen days." How long it would take for them to be declared overdue is not stated. Hudson's comment about four weeks has nothing to do with the rescue, he says "And I was getting short! Four more weeks and out! Now I'm gonna buy it on this rock!" He's talking about how much time he has left on his tour before he can leave the Corps with (presumably) an honorable discharge and pension. In short, he's talking Retirony, not rescue. Thus, dialogue makes it clear that once a rescue team is dispatched, it will arrive in seventeen days, but it is left unsaid how long before the rescue team will be sent. Not that the rescue team will be sent in seventeen days, and take an undisclosed amount of time to arrive.
• How did anything survive the explosion of the atmospheric processor? Not only it was very visibly huge and catastrophic, but Bishop himself gives an estimate of the blast's yield ("a blast radius of 30 kilometers; equal to about 40 megatons")
  • This is actually the MOST believable thing about the story. The atmosphere processor was partly or mostly underground. There were also a lot of hills and mountains. Ground bursts are not very effective for nuclear explosions as they waste a lot of energy. An explosion in a heavily shielded partly underground facility overdue waste even more. Really destructive nuclear explosions are airbusts, and they are often set off 1km or higher above the ground.
    • While that's all tecnically true... well, it was a 40mt blast. A ground burs of such yield would demolish everything (even reinforced concrete buildings) at a radius of 7 kilometers and a half. Furthermore, we saw it going off, it was massive. There is simply no way to handwave that the facility survived as anything but memories, much less in a semi-functional manner like in the game.
  • According to the devs, it was a "vertical explosion". Whatever.
    • It's the same principal as an RPG, not all explosions are spherical.
    • The problem with that is that we saw the explosion, the huge fireball was visible and obviously quite devastating. There is simply no way any nearby structures would be left standing (much less in semi-working conditions) after a 40 megaton blast.
    • As pointed out on the main page for Aliens, the explosion of the atmosphere processor is a major case of Artistic License – Nuclear Physics. A fusion reactor wouldn't go up in any kind of thermonuclear explosion. It might cause a conventional explosion you wouldn't want to be close to, but it probably wouldn't even take down the processor, much less the colony. Though that requires retconning every single line of dialogue and visual related to the explosion from the film...
• In the "Stasis Interrupted" DLC, (a) how does Hicks know where to go to find Michael Weyland during his confrontation with Ripley in the leadworks, and (b) how does he know it's Ripley who's fallen into the molten lead when all he can see is a bald person standing quite a distance away with their back to him?
• According to a Wey-Yu scientist, even if a chestburster could be removed surgically, then the cancerous placenta would still kill the host. The problem with this though, is that I think Ripley 8 would beg to differ.
  • Ripley 8 had alien DNA, remember. She wasn't fully human.
    • What about Dr Shaw from Prometheus?
    • The Dr. Shaw case was not, strictly, a chestburster. It might not have the same side-effects, given the differences in infection and resulting creature (and if one wants to be technical, there's no actual proof Dr. Shaw did not fall ill and perish shortly after Prometheus, so until the sequel comes out...).
    • Prometheus!chestburster and Alien!chestburster are two totally different species that happen to propagate in a similar fashion, probably due to the fact they were both bioengineered by the Space Jockeys/Engineers.
    • Technology marches on. Maybe by the time of Resurrection, they've had more experience dealing with them, and now know how to extract them without the host dying.
    • Also, I don't think the Prometheus chestburster was a chestburster. I mean, it was in her uterus and removed through, basically, a C-Section. Not only that, it wasn't a chestburster because the chestburster grows into an adult xenomorph. In the film, the creature grew into a giant Facehugger, as it facehugged the Engineer in the way a typical Facehugger does to humans and other creatures (and at the end, the creature that crawls out of the dead Engineer is the chestburster).
• What was the point of Weyland replacing the lab's defensive nerve gas that was lethal to xenomorphs to a mixture that was only lethal to humans and made xenomorphs sleepy? (And it's seen that it doesn't even affect xenomorphs anyway) Weyland made it abundantly clear that he didn't want his specimens destroyed but if that's the case why replace the gas with something completely useless and potentially obstructive to the scientists and bodyguards rather than just doing away with the gas entirely?
• About the ending, aren't the Colonial Marines on the ship at the end completely screwed? They're stuck on an FTL ship that's crawling with loyal We-Yu mercs and scientists and potential xenomorphs as well.
  • And for that matter, what about the rest of the Marines that took part in the assault?
    • Cruz mentions you going back to pick them up before you leave.

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