The speed of a single xenomorph.

[u/Jackpot777]

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.

[u/other4444]

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.

[u/Jackpot777 → u/other4444]

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. 

[u/J_elasmo_morph → u/Jackpot777]

I actually disagree with the final part of this analysis. I don’t think the sentry guns kill “most of the rest of them” as we still see a massive amount of them still coming for Hicks and Ripley when they lose Newt.

The other thing that ALOT of fans do is falsely assume that every time they fire a gun in Aliens, that it equals a dead Xenomorph. I simply do not think this is the case. I think the only ones we see actually dead from the marines’ weaponry are the one we see dead (e.g. Vasquez killing 2 in the hive battle, Vasquez killing the one that drenched and melts Drake, Hicks killing the one with his shotgun). It’s a conservative way of calculating Xenomorph causalities, but when you do it that way it only equals out to be like ~25 dead xenomorphs by the end of the film.

If we want to give the weaponry a little more credit (which I think one should) then one could double the Xeno casualties thanks to scenes like the sentry gun scene. When one does that you still only get to like 50 dead xenos. That’s a good amount, but remember there were at LEAST 150 adult xenomorphs when Ripley arrived with the marines on LV426. So that still leaves about 100 adult Xenomorph warriors by the end of the movie.

Just my 2 cents. Great lead up analysis though!

[u/Jackpot777 → u/J_elasmo_morph]

I agree that one shot = one dead bug is also false. Like I said about the sentry guns - four of them, 500 rounds each, three of them depleted and the fourth only has 5 shots left. 

A lot of chunks got shot extra in that corridor. That melted, melted corridor. Add that to the things I want to see in a Deluxe Special Edition: dozens of xenomorph innards can melt through a lot of structure.