Colony Rescue on LV-426

[Simon_Jester]

It's stupid, but a lot of people disable security systems to avoid hassle. I can imagine the captain of some ship ordering the biofilters turned down after a bunch of redshirts got sick because the biofilter accidentally filtered out their intestinal flora.

If you think that's too dumb to believe, I heard of a warship that got hammered because someone switched off the "incoming missile" alarm... because it kept giving annoying buzzes. Then someone fired a real missile at them. Oops.

[Baffalo]

I was speaking to a friend at work last night and I mentioned this thread and the ideas so far. He's a big Warhammer 40k guy, so he said that he would bank on the Imperial Guard or the Space Marines to handle the Xeno infestation with flying colors. His reasoning was thus:

• Space Marines and Imperial Guard will not hesitate to use deadly force.
  Bolters and other heavy guns might not be that safe near the reactor, but individual lasguns are fairly weak.
  Anyone infected by a facehugger is probably going to be executed (Imperial Guard are executed for trying to run away)
  Guardsmen will swarm in and, even if entire squads get killed, more and more will just keep coming.
  Space Marines are supposed to be unkillable (his words), and thus they're more likely to survive a Xeno attack.

I have a hard time believing that more soldiers = victory. I know that's what the Imperial Guard does, but death in this case will come in one of two ways: infected by facehugger (and maybe executed unless they're alone) or killed by the Xeno. If that's the case, eventually sheer attrition will grind the Xeno down until it has the chance to be killed. In theory, anyway. My only question is, even with rather callous commanders for the Guard, will they continue to throw lives at the situation until it's resolved? Or will they simply decide the world is unworthy to continue the assault?

[Darkevilme]

My only question is, even with rather callous commanders for the Guard, will they continue to throw lives at the situation until it's resolved? Or will they simply decide the world is unworthy to continue the assault?

Certainly not per the rules of the OP. the explicit restriction is 20 people with no armour support, which'll be tough for the guard knowing just how much they adore their tanks.

As for how well they do. It's my understanding that it depends greatly on which regiment of the imperial guard they're from. Some go all battle of stalingrad and send peasants with if they're lucky a working lasrifle each and all the training one can convey through a megaphone. Others stray into badass normal territory.

As for how many lives they'll be willing to expend. I suppose it depends on if the tech priest looks at that mechanical volcano god and declares that they must preserve this artifact of lost technology. As to my knowledge that's the only thing of note on L-426 that counts as valuable so it really depends on if terraformers are lost technology irreproduceable by the adaptus mechanus or not(I have no idea whether they are or not, someone pitch in?).
The imperium is callous as far as the lives of the colonists go so they're not what they'd be here for, billions yearly are slaughtered by orks, tortured by dark eldar, devoured by the tyranids or have their souls sucked out by daemons, a colony with a hundred people in it is NOTHING.

Then again, if the terraformer was lost technology then i'm pretty sure it would of been guarded by more than 20 imperial guard and this rather makes the sending of 20 to investigate a situation where more than 20 wasn't enough to stop things going to shit just bizarre.

So in summary, not per the OP and possibly not otherwise.

[Captain Seafort]

Certainly not per the rules of the OP. the explicit restriction is 20 people with no armour support, which'll be tough for the guard knowing just how much they adore their tanks.

No, the OP says they get whatever a 20-strong group would normally have, albeit without orbital support. If twenty infantry would normally be supported by an IFV or two, then they get their IFVs, just as the marines did.

[Tsyroc]

I thought it was standard to beam from pad to pad when possible, so unless he beamed directly onto the bridge or whatever, the Enterprise pad would have received him through their transporter system, and that system would have scanned and reassembled him, biofilter check and all.

I'd check the episode in question but I don't have it on DVD.

Also, do we know he beamed up using a transporter pad? Or did he just stand in his office, hit his combadge and tell the Enterprise he was ready to beam up, and they used their transporter to bring him on board?

It's been a while since I saw it - has anyone got that episode?

In one of the post TNG books the Trill symbiotes and the parasites from TNG are shown to be related. It's been a while since I read the book so I'm not entirely sure about the details but I think one was genetically engineered from the other, or at least tinkered with on a genetic level. Since the episode took place before the Trills revealed they were a joined species it makes it unlikely that the filter would see the parasite as a Trill symbiant.

Other than the biofilter just not picking up the parasite the next best answer is that the parasite controlling the admiral had the biofilter on the pad he was beeming from updated to allow or ignore parasites. Being in control of an admiral might have also made it possible for the "ignore parasite" programming being sent to all Federation biofilters as part of some latest update.

[Themightytom]

The tactics in Severed Dreams were in no small part dictated by the Narns being complete and utter morons, Garibaldi actually had a halfway sensible defensive plan, he just never got to implement it, pretty much every weapon needs to be reloaded eventually and carbine PPGs if nothing else have shown refire rates easily comparable to modern day automatic weapons so where do you get 'PPGs don't fire particularly fast' from?

Just observation of the tv show

[Borgholio]

The tactics in Severed Dreams were in no small part dictated by the Narns being complete and utter morons, Garibaldi actually had a halfway sensible defensive plan, he just never got to implement it, pretty much every weapon needs to be reloaded eventually and carbine PPGs if nothing else have shown refire rates easily comparable to modern day automatic weapons so where do you get 'PPGs don't fire particularly fast' from?

Just observation of the tv show

The handgun variety of the PPG is only a bit slower than a modern semi-automatic in terms of rate of fire. They do have PPG machine guns which are 2 - 3 times faster and even PPG miniguns that are pretty much a solid stream of fire. Garibaldi had way too much fun when he used one in the alternate future where the Shadows destroyed Babylon 5...

[Skylon]

And the Feddies then are horrified when:
A) The first colonists they beam out have their chests busted wide open.
B) They get a colonist who hasn't chest-busted but promptly does.

And they can't just kill the chestbusters because...?

Chestbusters aren't dangerous, ESPECIALLY on a Federation ship where you have to use replicators to get food. So why are people pretending that a colonist being killed by one spells doom for everyone?

It spelled doom for crew of the Nostromo, who had no weapons, no internal sensors and only a handful of people to hunt this completely unknown threat.

(Sorry for the delayed response as I was away for the weekend).

I wasn't suggesting it was a doom scenario for the Federation ship. Merely that you suggested the Federation had the best shot at rescuing the colonists when that was pretty much impossible. They'd all been impregnated by the time the Marines showed up. So, if the Federation crew transported them aboard and found them dead/infected their mission would rapidly turn into "Okay, what do we do about this infected colony?" instead of search and rescue.

Plus some amusement at the idea of a chestburster in sickbay.

[Ahriman238]

I was speaking to a friend at work last night and I mentioned this thread and the ideas so far. He's a big Warhammer 40k guy, so he said that he would bank on the Imperial Guard or the Space Marines to handle the Xeno infestation with flying colors. His reasoning was thus:

• Space Marines and Imperial Guard will not hesitate to use deadly force.
  Bolters and other heavy guns might not be that safe near the reactor, but individual lasguns are fairly weak.
  Anyone infected by a facehugger is probably going to be executed (Imperial Guard are executed for trying to run away)
  Guardsmen will swarm in and, even if entire squads get killed, more and more will just keep coming.
  Space Marines are supposed to be unkillable (his words), and thus they're more likely to survive a Xeno attack.

I have a hard time believing that more soldiers = victory. I know that's what the Imperial Guard does, but death in this case will come in one of two ways: infected by facehugger (and maybe executed unless they're alone) or killed by the Xeno. If that's the case, eventually sheer attrition will grind the Xeno down until it has the chance to be killed. In theory, anyway. My only question is, even with rather callous commanders for the Guard, will they continue to throw lives at the situation until it's resolved? Or will they simply decide the world is unworthy to continue the assault?

My dear Baffalo, that depends entirely on who the Guard are and where they're from. If they're Cadians, I think they may make out all right. Krieg or Tallarn Guard would die horribly, but they always were. I wonder if there were two squads of Tanith 1st/Valhallan 597th without named characters/plot armor, how they'd make out. I was rather impressed with the skill the 597th gnerally showed in sneaking around dark tunnels waiting for something to leap out and kill them, and they have lots of experience with the 'Nids which can only work in their favor.

Plus some amusement at the idea of a chestburster in sickbay.

Alien aboard the Starship Enterprise! Contain it with forcefields! Anesthezine gas! Oh my god, it's in the Jefferies Tubes! Send Goldshirts in after it!

[Borgholio]

Alien aboard the Starship Enterprise! Contain it with forcefields! Anesthezine gas! Oh my god, it's in the Jefferies Tubes! Send Goldshirts in after it!

Nah, we both know it'd be a queen and set up a nest in engineering near the warp core. Redshirts would go in, get ambushed, shoot wildly...and as they said in the movie, Adios Muchachos...

[Galvatron]

Is there any reason the Federation ship can't simply lock onto the colonists' PDTs and beam them out of the atmosphere processing station with the runabout's transporter?

[Borgholio]

Is there any reason the Federation ship can't simply lock onto the colonists' PDTs and beam them out of the atmosphere processing station with the runabout's transporter?

158 Colonists can't fit on a runabout...I think that's a reason.

[Galvatron]

So...beam them out a few at a time? Site to site transport?

[Ahriman238]

To where? Perhaps if they could store them in the pattern buffer, like Scotty was... But no, it's a one-shot capability never used again.

[Galvatron]

To where?

Anywhere but the alien nest, I'd imagine.

How about the colony's operations center? It made a decent enough staging area for the marines and the medical center was nearby. I'd say that's perfect.

At the very least, they could beam one or two people out to assess their condition and get some solid intel about what they were up against.

[PREDATOR490]

All they would be beaming back is corpses, logically those xenos came from the colonists that birthed them and the birthing process is quite fatal to the host. The Colonial Marines were only able to locate the colonists via implants or something. Dont think it allowed them to find out if they were alive and all of the implants were located in the hive. I suppose the lady we saw getting busted was amoung the last to be caught by the Xenos and they would have been busy setting up the Queen / Hive.

At best you would find a few straggler colonists like the lady who are about to get busted so you have a potential in 1/158 bodies to beam up that wont be visiously mauled. Assuming the Aliens impregnated them all... rather than use some of the bodies for food etc. to help the busters mature into the full xeno. I highly suspect the first transporter batch would contain a horrific ensemble of carnage that would promptly cause the Feddies to freak out.

Sickbay biobeds have demonstrated the ability to restrain people with forcefields so a chestbuster shouldnt be that hard to contain once the Feds get wise to the situation. That said, Runabouts dont have biobeds or a sickbay. They dont even have much for jeffrey tubes either and one person sized door. A Xeno is gonna have a hard time 'sneaking' into one and a chest buster will be woefully fucked trying to get out.

Incidentally, I would expect the Stormies / Feddies to look for the original alien ship. Shouldnt be that hard for them to find and if they follow the events of the film properly. They will meet actual facehuggers in the lab before ever going near the hive. The Colonial Marines were completely unprepared and apparantly alien life hasnt been encountered on any scale like Xenos. All of the groups in the sub are more experienced.

[Batman]

They don't even need to do site-to-site (and we know they can do that). Just beam up the colonists 3 at a time (or whatever is the maximum for a runabout, I'm still working my way through DS9), then beam them down again somewhere not overrun with xenos. The total population of Hadley's Hope at the time of Aliens was 158. With one at a time all of them still being there no site-to-site at a rate of one a minute that still means less than three hours to evacuate every single human colonist. As Mike pointed out, the movie marines as was needed to be struck with the 'sucks to be you' bat rather massively to end up in the trouble they, well, ended up in. While I'm the first to admit that the TNG Feds wouldn't know ground warfare tactics if they came up and punched them in the nose they nevertheless have a massive technological advantage over the original movie team even if we assume the biofilter as usual doesn't do its job, the transporters as usual don't work as they're supposed to...
For this to go wrong for the Trek crew you need the entirety of TNG 'Let's do everything wrong we possibly can' on top of the movie 'the universe seriously hates you' bad luck.

[Galvatron]

My only concern is that the Feddies are going to be morons and beam themselves down into the alien nest like they would a Borg cube.

Aside from that, is a Federation runabout slower than the Sulaco? It took the latter about three weeks to get to LV-426 from Earth. Wouldn't the feddies arrive much sooner and perhaps in time to save a lot of lives?

[PREDATOR490]

Not really... I got the impression they only got around to sending the marines some time after losing contact with the colony. Which gives the Xenos 3 weeks + however long between the first Newts parents got facehugged to the point the marines got called. Either the Xenos were smart enough to cut contact extremely early, the Xenos went undetected for a shocklingly long time or the colonists were terminally stupid not calling for help when the first chestbusters / xenos started mauling people.

In theory, the colony could have been ravaged within hours to a few days. Which makes it possible even if the rescue mission arrived the very day they were sent it would already be too late. As for the Feddies beaming directly into the nest...
It is more likely they would beam down into the Admin building and the medical lab had facehuggers in jars along with notes. Bishop found them easily enough so Feddies should be capable of doing so and I think even THEY would realise beaming into an area that potentially has facehuggers is a really bad idea.

[Darth Wong]

I thought it was standard to beam from pad to pad when possible, so unless he beamed directly onto the bridge or whatever, the Enterprise pad would have received him through their transporter system, and that system would have scanned and reassembled him, biofilter check and all.

I'd check the episode in question but I don't have it on DVD.

Also, do we know he beamed up using a transporter pad? Or did he just stand in his office, hit his combadge and tell the Enterprise he was ready to beam up, and they used their transporter to bring him on board?

It's been a while since I saw it - has anyone got that episode?

In one of the post TNG books the Trill symbiotes and the parasites from TNG are shown to be related. It's been a while since I read the book so I'm not entirely sure about the details but I think one was genetically engineered from the other, or at least tinkered with on a genetic level. Since the episode took place before the Trills revealed they were a joined species it makes it unlikely that the filter would see the parasite as a Trill symbiant.

Other than the biofilter just not picking up the parasite the next best answer is that the parasite controlling the admiral had the biofilter on the pad he was beeming from updated to allow or ignore parasites. Being in control of an admiral might have also made it possible for the "ignore parasite" programming being sent to all Federation biofilters as part of some latest update.

The Star Trek biofilter seems to be a lot like a modern computer virus scanner: it doesn't know how to identify dangerous pathogens until they're already in its database.

This is not that surprising: the human body is hardly a single-DNA organism. There is actually a multitude of foreign bodies taking up residence in our bodies, for various reasons, some of which are beneficial. They would not design a transporter with a "default deny" programming that only allows in known organisms, especially since they transport such a wide variety of alien species. So they must design a transporter with a "default allow" program, which eliminates known hazardous organisms.

[Galvatron]

In theory, the colony could have been ravaged within hours to a few days.

I'll disagree with that. The colonists were both armed AND lacked the disadvantage of having to fear the alien blood burning a hole through a bulkhead. I figure the aliens had to employ stealth and abduct the colonists a few at a time for quite a while before they finally had the numbers to overwhelm the colony.

[PREDATOR490]

In theory, the colony could have been ravaged within hours to a few days.

I'll disagree with that. The colonists were both armed AND lacked the disadvantage of having to fear the alien blood burning a hole through a bulkhead. I figure the aliens had to employ stealth and abduct the colonists a few at a time for quite a while before they finally had the numbers to overwhelm the colony.

Acid burning through walls is still very much a problem even on a planet. It gives the Xenos one extra hole to climb through AND screws up any wires, cables etc. Which could expain the comm blackout. Otherwise, you have 158 idiots that didnt think to call for help the moment people started vanishing. Xenos are not that stealthy and there is no amount of stealth that justifies colonists not calling for help the moment the first chestbuster erupted.

Regardless, by the time the rescue operation is launched the majority of the colony could be completely wiped out. The incubation period for facehuggers has ranged from hours to a day and the alien ship had hundreds of eggs. Not counting the addition of either a queen on the ship or a queen emerging from the hosts. It would be quite possible for them to be overwhelmed within a few days which keeps them distracted long enough for the Queen to setup shop in the reactor. Then the drones carry back the bodies to the reactor like they did with Newt.

[Galvatron]

Acid burning through walls is still very much a problem even on a planet.

A problem, but not a life threatening one like it would be aboard a spaceship. Explosive decompression is a lot worse than a comm blackout.

It gives the Xenos one extra hole to climb through AND screws up any wires, cables etc. Which could expain the comm blackout. Otherwise, you have 158 idiots that didnt think to call for help the moment people started vanishing.

True enough. It would explain why Bishop had to manually patch into the dish. Any colonists that were still alive at when they lost contact were probably too frightened to venture out there to do the same.

Xenos are not that stealthy and there is no amount of stealth that justifies colonists not calling for help the moment the first chestbuster erupted.

Not stealthy? Not stealthy?

Did we see the same movies? How many instances of alien-sneaking-up-on-victim do I need to cite?

Regardless, by the time the rescue operation is launched the majority of the colony could be completely wiped out. The incubation period for facehuggers has ranged from hours to a day and the alien ship had hundreds of eggs. Not counting the addition of either a queen on the ship or a queen emerging from the hosts. It would be quite possible for them to be overwhelmed within a few days which keeps them distracted long enough for the Queen to setup shop in the reactor. Then the drones carry back the bodies to the reactor like they did with Newt.

Dialogue in Aliens implied the derelict to be roughly a few days away from the colony, past a mountain range in "the middle of nowhere." Now, I'm not going to nitpick about distance and terrain all that much, but if the queen wasn't one of the first generation of aliens birthed in the colony, it would have taken the firstborn soldier aliens quite a while to infest Hadley's Hope since they would have had to make at least one round trip to and from the ship.

[Revy]

Now I really want to watch an Aliens prequel showing the downfall of the colony. Y'know, like that JC's The Thing prequel they did recently. Hell, you know that crapy looking Aliens game they're doing about a Marine follow up mission to the colony? Screw that, make a survival horror game where you play a colonist trying to survive the Alien takeover. You could even make Newt a playable character for certain sections of vent crawling.

[Terralthra]

My only concern is that the Feddies are going to be morons and beam themselves down into the alien nest like they would a Borg cube.

Aside from that, is a Federation runabout slower than the Sulaco? It took the latter about three weeks to get to LV-426 from Earth. Wouldn't the feddies arrive much sooner and perhaps in time to save a lot of lives?

Was it ever confirmed that the station Ripley was on in the beginning of Aliens actually orbited Earth? The only time I remember it being stated explicitly was in her nightmare, and I do remember Burke stating that she had "drifted right through the core systems," but I think that was also in her nightmare.