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Koorisch posted:I'll update this, I'd guess that after she smashed right into the ship she ricoched out back into space while unconcious, that's the only way that she could be both alive AND rescued by a ship. It's difficult to tell because everything is intentionally disorienting, but Ripley was clipped into a railing on the Torrens, right?
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Jun 9, 2015 21:34
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Sel Nar posted:Actually, the Cryosleep is used to mitigate or prevent the side effects of the FTL drives used by human ships in the Aliens universe; as an example, it takes 17 days to go from Earth to LV-426, which is part of the Zeta Reticuli system. It's 39 Light years away, so being able to tear rear end there in just over 2 weeks suggests a FTL speed of 2 LY/day. I waited to respond to this until after I had watched at least Alien. After lifting from LV-426, Parker mentions that they're looking at 10 months travel time back to Earth. Granted this after landing and taking off from a .86 Earth Gravity planetoid, which likely to a decent amount of reaction mass. Ripley later estimates that the shuttle will take some 6 weeks to reach "The Network" (presumably sensor net at the edge of controlled space), but is picked up in Aliens several decades (60 years, I think?) later; haven't rewatched Aliens yet to double check that figure. Now military ships may actually use FTL drives, since they're the kind of thing you want to get to places posthaste. However, it looks like at the time of Alien, and presumably A:I commercial ships aren't equipped with fast FTL drives. Though there is the chance that during the landing and take off the Nostromo's FTL was damaged. It would be interesting to know where you got your figures for travel time though.
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Jun 10, 2015 05:21
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Coffeehitler posted:I waited to respond to this until after I had watched at least Alien. After lifting from LV-426, Parker mentions that they're looking at 10 months travel time back to Earth. Granted this after landing and taking off from a .86 Earth Gravity planetoid, which likely to a decent amount of reaction mass. Ripley later estimates that the shuttle will take some 6 weeks to reach "The Network" (presumably sensor net at the edge of controlled space), but is picked up in Aliens several decades (60 years, I think?) later; haven't rewatched Aliens yet to double check that figure. Of note, Ripley managed to go undetected and was on her way out of detection range when she got picked up.
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Jun 10, 2015 05:52
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Considering how vague much of the setting is and how many writers have had their grubby mitts on it over the years, I would be really surprised if anything about travel, distance, time or scale in the Alien universe was remotely internally consistent.
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Jun 10, 2015 07:05
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TomViolence posted:Considering how vague much of the setting is and how many writers have had their grubby mitts on it over the years, I would be really surprised if anything about travel, distance, time or scale in the Alien universe was remotely internally consistent. It's also not especially important. All that matters is knowing that space travel is expensive, difficult, and nowhere near instantaneous, requiring a lot of resources and with a lot of trouble finding small things in the vastness of space. Exact numbers don't really matter next to the general narrative role of space being very indifferent and isolating.
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Jun 10, 2015 07:07
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Coffeehitler posted:I waited to respond to this until after I had watched at least Alien. After lifting from LV-426, Parker mentions that they're looking at 10 months travel time back to Earth. Granted this after landing and taking off from a .86 Earth Gravity planetoid, which likely to a decent amount of reaction mass. Ripley later estimates that the shuttle will take some 6 weeks to reach "The Network" (presumably sensor net at the edge of controlled space), but is picked up in Aliens several decades (60 years, I think?) later; haven't rewatched Aliens yet to double check that figure. 57 years between Alien and Aliens; Ripley went right through the densest population of inhabited worlds without being picked up, and only some salvagers on the far side of the human sphere of influence snagged her. For my figures for travel time, I specifically used Hicks' comment on 'estimated time of rescue' from after the detachment to LV-426 in Aliens is considered overdue, which takes place shortly after the APC and Dropship are destroyed. Obviously, there's going to be a large shift in overall speeds in that timeframe, as there's been some 50+ years of technological advancement, but there's an insinuation that Seventeen Days is considered to be around average speed for a 39-40 Light Year trip. (As for LV-426 being in Zeta Reticuli, If I remember correctly, it was mentioned in Alien when the crew were hauled out of bed to poke at the distress signal, and corroborated by a significant amount of supplementary material.) You are correct that there's no real description on the travel time for non-military vessels except for Parker's comment about the Nostromo taking 10 months, and Ripley's comment on the narcissus taking 6 weeks, but there's two mitigating factors in both situtations; the Nostromo was towing a mining rig the size of Sevastopol station, which would obviously slow it down due to simple inertia until they got up to cruising speed, and the Narcissus' engines had been burnt out by Ripley's ultimately-successful attempt to shake the Alien off; she drifted in cryosleep for the amount of time she did because, as mentioned above, she wasn't picked up until she was at the far side of human-influenced space from her starting point. Sidenote: having pulled open the AvP wiki, which happens to have a solid description for practically everything (I'm half wondering if Xenomrph wrote the drat thing), it mentions that the class of ship the Nostromo belongs to has an FTL drive capable of hitting 0.42 LY/day, though that maximum speed drops to around 0.1 LY/day when towing a heavy cargo. Specifically, this link details the general specifications for ships like the Nostromo, and, by extension, the similarly-designed Torrens and Anesidora. http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Lockmart_CM-88B_Bison (Note that the latter two ships are not the same design, though images will show significant design commonality between all three)
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Jun 10, 2015 18:13
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Looking at the wiki page for the Sulaco/Conestoga-class ships, they've got an FTL speed of .74 LY/day which should explain the 17 day rescue period. And holy poo poo, does Colonial Marines (and its DLC) sound like its just taking a huge poo poo on Aliens/Alien3. As an aside, its pretty hard to sleep during Aliens. I put it on and expected to sleep through it, but only got to the first major engagement (under the terraformers) before I had to turn it off so I could sleep. :P
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Jun 10, 2015 18:48
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Neeeeeerds.
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Jun 10, 2015 18:51
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I think the best course of action with all pure story focused scifi (especially meant as commentary to current societal issues) is to ignore relativity and either pretend everything is very close together or just handwave FTL and again waive any idea of relativity.my dad posted:Neeeeeerds. Says the person posting in a Let's Play thread. 
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Jun 10, 2015 19:10
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CrazySalamander posted:Looks like it's closer to 700c. Besides that, once you handwave FTL it's generally accepted for you to do whatever you want with time dilation since the equations are broken anyway(the closest thing you could say is that as soon as you breached c you would from your perspective teleport instantly, unfortunately leaving you with no way to ever tell your engines to stop). Totally agree with you on relativistic economics though. The time value of money makes things stupidly hard unless there is some form of government backing- and Aliens seems to be the pinnacle of Laissez-Faire economics. While I hate to be That Nerd, I don't know if the Colonial Marines Technical Manual counts as canon, but it has some hard numbers and mechanics on Alien universe FTL. It interestingly enough has the FTL work the other way around from traditional high-speed space travel: due to the odd mechanics of it, you more "real time" passes for the travellers than the rest of the world, which is why they need cryosleep to avoid arriving as 90-year-olds. The maximum FTL practical FTL speed is quoted as "0.74 light years per day," with it being stated that higher speeds are possible, but would increase the travellers' aging so much that the ship would probably be a decrepit hulk by the time it arrives(page 118 if anyone has the book on hand and wants to have a read). Also, I'd like to chime in and say that personally I kind of liked the alien-free sections. If it had all just been the same Alien stuff from the early game all the way through, I think it would've gotten dull. So it both provided variety AND gave the Aliens some emotional0 punch when they showed up again. If anything, I feel like the only thing the game really lacked were more sections mixing aliens and human dangers, so you'd have the option/temptation of bringing the alien down on their heads or using them as distractions. Ending was a bit of a cop-out, but I imagine it was for the sake of otherwise preserving the canon. I mean, imagine if Amanda had returned and told everyone about the xenomorphs, or otherwise prompted an investigation, then Aliens could never really have happened. Plus, if I remember right, in the non-Director's Cut version of Aliens, the scene with Ripley learning her daughter died of old age years ago wasn't included, so if we assume the non-DC version is canon, this jives pretty well with canonical events.
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Jun 12, 2015 10:58
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PurpleXVI posted:While I hate to be That Nerd, I don't know if the Colonial Marines Technical Manual counts as canon, but it has some hard numbers and mechanics on Alien universe FTL. It interestingly enough has the FTL work the other way around from traditional high-speed space travel: due to the odd mechanics of it, you more "real time" passes for the travellers than the rest of the world, which is why they need cryosleep to avoid arriving as 90-year-olds. The maximum FTL practical FTL speed is quoted as "0.74 light years per day," with it being stated that higher speeds are possible, but would increase the travellers' aging so much that the ship would probably be a decrepit hulk by the time it arrives(page 118 if anyone has the book on hand and wants to have a read). So, a weird reverse time dilation effect? An interesting take on FTL, I suppose. It would make sense as to why they need cryosleep when a ship can go long distances from point A to point B and back and not be advancing hundreds of years from the frame of reference of point A. You would almost _have_ to have a synthetic on board to monitor things and manage emergencies while everyone is getting their beauty rest.
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Jun 12, 2015 15:49
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PurpleXVI posted:While I hate to be That Nerd, I don't know if the Colonial Marines Technical Manual counts as canon, but it has some hard numbers and mechanics on Alien universe FTL. It interestingly enough has the FTL work the other way around from traditional high-speed space travel: due to the odd mechanics of it, you more "real time" passes for the travellers than the rest of the world, which is why they need cryosleep to avoid arriving as 90-year-olds. The maximum FTL practical FTL speed is quoted as "0.74 light years per day," with it being stated that higher speeds are possible, but would increase the travellers' aging so much that the ship would probably be a decrepit hulk by the time it arrives(page 118 if anyone has the book on hand and wants to have a read). I believe the Technical Manual is canon.
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Jun 12, 2015 19:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Also, I'd like to chime in and say that personally I kind of liked the alien-free sections. If it had all just been the same Alien stuff from the early game all the way through, I think it would've gotten dull. So it both provided variety AND gave the Aliens some emotional0 punch when they showed up again. If anything, I feel like the only thing the game really lacked were more sections mixing aliens and human dangers, so you'd have the option/temptation of bringing the alien down on their heads or using them as distractions. I definitely agree with you here, in that there could have been more interplay between the alien and human antagonists. I think the only thing that could've counted against it is the seeming relative stupidity of the human AI. On the whole, their behaviour seems pretty erratic and slipshod outside of scripted encounters, so them interacting with the alien more often might have lead to some rather daft moments.
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Jun 12, 2015 20:01
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Hi, I just wanted to say thanks a whole bunch for doing this! I possess neither the nerve nor the computer to play the game myself but always wanted to experience it. The quality is great and I love the subtitles so yeah, thanks again. edit: One thing though, do you ever include death scenes? Being only on episode two I don't wanna read the thread yet so apologies if it's been covered. Opal fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 12:10
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Opal posted:One thing though, do you ever include death scenes? Being only on episode two I don't wanna read the thread yet so apologies if it's been covered. Oh yeah, don't you worry, they're in there!  While I'm checking in, I've almost got my first batch of survivor mode runs perfected, so I'll be posting them up sometime this weekend hopefully. EDIT: drat, I need to stop making promises I can't keep. Still working on it. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 17:45
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 Survivor DLC: Amanda I've finally got my act together and recorded my first survivor mode video. It's nice, short and relatively simple and should serve as a good introduction to the survivor challenges. Essentially, we are thrown into an arena with the alien and we must escape. Along the way there are optional, time sensitive objectives that we can complete for additional score. There is a cast of potential characters we can choose to play as for each challenge, each with a different loadout of equipment and blueprints.
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Jul 20, 2015 13:20
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Oh yeah - I now this is a bit of a poorly-timed comment, what with the end of the main game being the last update, but was anyone else vaguely annoyed that the explosive bolt mechanism was exactly the same as the mechanism for overloading a ship reactor? It just jumped out at me as being particularly unimaginiative in the design of the machines of the game - especially when everything else was so good.
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Jul 20, 2015 13:39
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Samovar posted:Oh yeah - I now this is a bit of a poorly-timed comment, what with the end of the main game being the last update, but was anyone else vaguely annoyed that the explosive bolt mechanism was exactly the same as the mechanism for overloading a ship reactor? It just jumped out at me as being particularly unimaginiative in the design of the machines of the game - especially when everything else was so good. I think it was chiefly intended as a direct homage to the closing scenes of the movie. Priming the Nostromo's self-destruct is an iconic and tense scene that I'm sure they felt they had to shoehorn in somewhere. However, given that we get to re-enact that very scene in the Last Survivor DLC it does seem a bit redundant.
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Jul 20, 2015 14:23
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This is the part of the game that I put an inordinate amount of time into, before getting dragged kicking and screaming back to the main campaign. Waaaay back at game release, a twitch streamer I recognized had a top 10 time of 1:18 on this survivor level, and I remembered seeing that he was terrible at this game earlier. So of course, I couldn't let it stand that he had a better time than I did, so I ran this level over and over until I finally beat his time. By then, our scores had dropped out of the top 10, and though I was tempted to just leave it at that, I figured that I had already put the time in, so I may as well go all the way. Long story short; I had the fastest time on this level for a very short while before the next guy came and took it back. Now it's the 3rd fastest, 50.18. Fastest is 49.94 by a guy called Metzix, who has also relatively recently taken top time on almost every other map. So you were right - that 36 second time is a crock of poo poo. Everything faster than about ~48 is going to be impossible without a mod to let the character run more quickly, or some glitch no one has told anyone else about. Most of the other survivor levels don't have these cheated times on them, however. The only one that does, is the top time on Severance in the Corporate Lockdown DLC. All the rest are true times. That being said, several of them rely on a clip that's on many of these levels which allows you to push an elevator button through the wall. Saturnine Aberrance fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jul 20, 2015 |
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Jul 20, 2015 16:11
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I have LOOOOOVED this LP. There's no way my poor nerves could tolerate actually playing this game. Hell, even just watching, I'm cringing back in my seat looking for the walls and other reality around me to remind me that I'm not trapped in a ridiculous situation with an even more ridiculous ALIEN FACE RIPPER coming to EAT MY BALLS! Thank you.
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Aug 8, 2015 04:16
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People getting the fast times on the DLC seems to be from just dodging the objectives and going straight for the generator. So that works.
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Aug 8, 2015 06:24
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Will there be any more videos or is the LP done?
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Oct 7, 2015 07:08
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Regrettably I've gotten very lax recently and haven't been setting aside the time to  enough to finish out survivor mode. Watch this space, though, as I do plan on getting them done - if only to prove to myself I can.
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Oct 7, 2015 11:01
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You're going to need some serious pratice for some of them. Trying to beat this game's extra content isn't easy.
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Oct 18, 2015 17:26
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