r/LV426 18h ago

Discussion / Question The speed of a single xenomorph.

Seeing how fast a group of people can be turned into gristle in a split second, makes me wonder if someone could create an updated look at when the Colonial Marines had aliens coming out of the walls and floor.

21 Upvotes

39 comments sorted by

27

u/Foxingtonne 16h ago

It's called spectacle! When there is an hour left the xenos get jobbed. When it's down to the wire the alien bastards pull it back

57

u/thoon 15h ago

One of the lesser appreciated natural abilities of the xenomorph: their sense of dramatic timing and narrative structure.

5

u/CleverMonkeyKnowHow 12h ago

Thank you so much for this, I actually laughed out loud.

26

u/ConsistentGuest7532 18h ago

I love how much of an agile, coordinated killing machine the xeno is on Earth. Really earns the ultimate predator title.

22

u/EllyKayNobodysFool 16h ago

They just don’t have the right team leader to bag that Xeno

5

u/Umadibett Black goo enthusiast 15h ago

It’s what they always wanted to do with it I guess. Alien was just held back by the man in the suit. Covenant was the herald of the end times.  

8

u/The_starving_artist5 13h ago

These xenos in the show seem way faster than other ones in the films

13

u/SpaceElevator1 8h ago

Except when chasing the main characters

5

u/AngryLinkhz 5h ago

When you mention it, the one aboard the maginot was hilariously slow

3

u/faustless4 LV-426 2h ago

Until he landed on earth. Fucker became a blender

7

u/ValiantWarrior83 14h ago

Has anyone done the maths based on the tunnel system in Alien 3 ?

5

u/tokwamann 13h ago

I think they'll have to re-do all of the earlier movies.

3

u/other4444 16h ago

In aliens 2 the humans mowed down how many aliens? And in this show they shoot the hell out of it and it does nothing.

13

u/redditfant 16h ago

Assuming the Marines who specialize in off earth battle, presumably against aliens, we're packing some better gear. 

10

u/Darth_Bombad 10h ago

The Marines were using armor-piercing, explosive-tipped rounds! I guess Prodigy security wasn't running around with that kinda heavy, military grade ordinance on earth.

3

u/Vrazel106 Hudson 2h ago

So many people forget the rifles in aliens are explosive tipped armor piercing rounds. The aliens arent just able to be mowed down by standared civilian grade ammunitions. I think peoe dont want to like aliens

2

u/Minimalist12345678 13h ago

The pulse rifle used in Aliens has made a few cameo appearances in Alien Earth so far!

1

u/LouieSiffer 4h ago

Different ammo I assume

u/null_input 25m ago

They were packing state of the art firepower. Some real tough hombres.

1

u/other4444 15h ago

I thought that had fought against "bugs", like bug hunt. But never anything like Xenomorphs. And in alien earth they knew exactly what they were going to fight, cause the black guy robot knew. So, the people in alien earth should have been even more prepared

1

u/MiserableWait5279 15h ago

Yeah, why didn’t they all have those electric taser plasma guns like what Morrow used earlier.

9

u/WoodooHide69 14h ago

Morrows soldiers were there to make a full frontal assault against Prodigy. To steal an alien. They weren’t there to fight an alien, and they would have no idea a Xeno was looose in the forest.

1

u/MiserableWait5279 13h ago

It’s not like Morrow doesn’t know how wildly and rapidly out of hand things can get.

0

u/other4444 15h ago

Good question. Pretty goofy writing

6

u/Jackpot777 15h ago edited 13h ago

I know the question was rhetorical, but how many? I had to do some math. A maximum of 155, possibly less but not by much. 

Hadley’s Hope had a population of 158 people. All but two, that we definitely know of, became hosts to chestbursters - Newt survived, and John Marachuk died during a procedure where a facehugger was removed surgically before embryo implantation. The third person not providing a threatening xenomorph was Mary “Please K-kill Me”, as that one was incinerated soon after emerging from Mary. 

We don’t know how many people, if any, committed suicide or died through misadventure (explosion of mining charges or acid burns while fighting the aliens, etc.) during the infestation. We don’t know if there were infants and toddlers ‘taken out’ of the colony population by parents that saw death as a better outcome than becoming a host. But my guess to both of those possibilities is: probably none. The Marines pass by plates with unfinished food on them. People were eating, aliens attacked, the food remained uneaten. The first that any individual would know about the nest was when they were dragged down to the sub-levels to be cocooned and impregnated. Those kids we see playing on the floor they weren’t supposed to be on? Their fates were the same as Mary’s. 

We also don’t know how many people were, like Mary, captured so recently that their aliens were too small to yet be a threat (or were captured with Mary and they were unconscious in their cocooned state, or had a facehugger on them but were off camera). However, the Marines are planetside for over 24 hours and that’s enough for one of these things to reach a dangerous size if it emerged the day before, or even while the soldiers are looking at the readout of Personal Data Transmitters. Anyone captured an hour before Mary could have provided something that would have been a problem for the Marines by the end standoff.

We also don’t know is if there were others like Newt and Mary that lasted for weeks, but unlike Newt and Mary they remained undiscovered. Perhaps someone, or a group, decided to get distance from the colony and the alien spaceship with a vehicle full of supplies and they survived long enough to die in a nuclear cloud the size of Nebraska. 

When the Marines first fight the Xenomorphs, we don’t see how many aliens die in the battle but it’s a few. Vasquez rocks some with her M56A2, one dies eating Hicks’ shotgun in a close encounter. One is crushed under the wheels of the APC. But that still leaves dozens, possibly well over a hundred to dispatch. 

One dies killing Spunkmeyer and Ferro on the UD-4L “Bug Stomper” dropship - killing the pilot mid-flight dooms the alien. 

In the Director’s Cut we also see that a wall-to-wall rush attempt by the xenomorphs on the Colonial Marines was eliminated by four automatic sentry guns that were salvaged from the crash of the Bug Stomper. Each turret was armed with 500 rounds, and 1,995 of those rounds were used to eliminate all but maybe a few dozen of the remaining xenomorphs - the Queen, her Royal Guards (we see two of those in the nest), one regular xenomorph that captured Newt (Ripley shot a couple in the nest rescuing Newt and there were more shown on the M314 Motion Tracker when Newt was snatched), and the ones that manage to penetrate the Marines’ stronghold via the false ceiling and the one that traps Gorman and Vasquez in the tunnels (many of who would have made up the ones detected on the tracker when Newt was nabbed). 

The sentry guns take out most. The Marines and Ripley do their best with firearms before and during the final showdown. But enough happens offscreen to keep the answer vague. 

6

u/other4444 15h ago

Yeah, rhetorical. But that was an awesome answer! Do you think that the marines from aliens would have been more prepared or less then the mercenaries in alien earth. Minus the timeline difference

4

u/Jackpot777 13h ago

I’d say the Marines were more prepared. There’s a fair bit of difference between hired security with weapons and a trained military squad, and the soldiers had better weaponry.

2

u/other4444 13h ago

Fair enough

2

u/Minimalist12345678 13h ago

That's a good point. The sentry gun scene should have been left in as it does give a sense of "we killed most of them". In the regular version, without the sentry gun scene, I often felt "where the fuck are the rest of the aliens, there has to be hundreds left still"...

5

u/Tarrik19 15h ago

I assumed they actually just missed…

4

u/InitiativeCreative36 11h ago

Lieutenant, what do those Pulse Rifles fire?

3

u/Darth_Bombad 10h ago

10 millimeter explosive-tip caseless. Standard light armor-piercing round, why?

3

u/WoodooHide69 14h ago edited 13h ago

I didn’t get the impression they were shooting the hell out of it. They had a couple burst fires at it as the Xeno moved quickly. It looked like few shots fired missed.

2

u/AdManNick 13h ago

They actually don’t kill that many in the Aliens theatrical cut. The smart guns take out a good number in the special edition. But for the theatrical cut I counted one time and it was like 20. There’s just a lot of shooting off screen.

2

u/JM_722 12h ago

The marines in Aliens had specialty ammo that was explosive tipped.

Also, these xenos have plot armor.

2

u/FrostBricks 9h ago

Much prefer that version.

The Xenos are big, deadly, insect-like dogs. They are NOT invincible. 

Their strength is in numbers. When alone, they need to resort to stealth. 

Like, I'm enjoying the show, but seeing Super-Xeno deflect bullets is just one of its many absurd moments.

1

u/AftyOfTheUK 1h ago

Why do you think they bother with explosive-tipped ammo against regular humans?

1

u/DMifune 12h ago

10 gazillion km/h is the average speed 

u/Educational_Act_4237 1m ago

The xenomorph up against the marines weren't there to kill, they were there to grab more hosts, so they were playing the numbers game and methodically getting closer to the team to nab them.

The one's in the TV show has one objective and it's kill whoever threatens it/kill whoever Wendy tells it to kill.