So I'm just curious about this. How big of a threat would Xenos be if they were transported to Modern Earth? Is it a doomsday scenario? A mild annoyance? Nukes are the only way to be sure?
How many? Is there a Queen or PredAlien to keep creating more xenos? Or is it maybe just a couple of drones, or maybe hybrids? To many variables, more info is needed from the OP to give a better answer.
Is this real life? Or a cloned world were the movie was never made. And it also depends were their spawned.
With their ability to infest and entrench themselves in pretty much any eco-system, reproduce quickly, and actively resist any and all containment efforts, I'd say they're definitely the ultimate doomsday scenario.
IIRC from most of the threads on this very topic in all the years I've spent on here, the xenomorphs aren'ts quite as horrible a threat as it initially would appear to be. Their main weakness is their means of reproduction. The queens need a LOT of room to set up shop, lay eggs, and have places to keep hosts held. Only the queen can produce eggs. The queens produce one facehugger per egg. Only facehuggers from those eggs can produce drones. Each facehugger can only implant into one host. Each host can only gestate one drone. Hosts themselves must be of a sufficient size, at least the size of a...I want to say medium-largish dog. The main wildcard here is that there's different theories about how a queen gets formed. Is the egg signaled in some way to produce a queen-producing facehugger? Or does the implanted embryo detect the need for a queen and change accordingly? Or does the drone later become a queen upon detecting the need for one? To my knowledge it never really gets confirmed as which way is more correct. Either way, you can probably figure out pretty quickly where a nest is based on the number of abductions of sufficiently sized animals in a given area. This is will be easiest in urban centers, farms, and the like. This will be the most difficult to detect in wild regions where animals of that size go missing unnoticed as a norm. The tough part upon locating the nest is ensuring that every single drone and eggs is contained and killed as we don't know yet which is the more vital in the chain of starting a new hive, though I'm sure we'd figure it out fairly quickly, which would streamline the process slightly. Would would screw us in actually taking the things down is that... 1: We don't have much in the way of personal weapons that can kill them in CQB without getting friendlies killed/maimed by acid blood bursting all over. 2: The queens are NOT stupid. Feral, but quite clever. This is the tyrannid problem; it's too easy to think that the whole lot are mindless beasts, when the queen is a canny puppetmaster of her drones. So yeah, it'd suck, but unless we're going by the pants on head retarded shit from the Aliens comics, this should be an actual doomsday scenario.
I still say the most important factor is if its the real world, or the "real world" aka a clone of ours world only without the movie, with the movie we should have enough info on the aliens to just bomb them as soun as we find them.
Yup. This is a major problem, if not The Problem, actually. I think it was claimed a few times in previous threads that a drone is capable of evolving into a queen on its own if there is no queen or the one currently controlling the hive is killed. Can't remember anything about eggs spontaneously gestating queen-producing facehuggers btw. However, if spontaneous morphs are actually canon or at least official, then we could be looking at the worst case scenario of nuking them as a sure-fire means of total eradication or at the very least, massive firebombing of all infested areas. This of course depends on their spread. The more scattered they are, the merrier the nuke / firebomb rain will be... EDIT: ...which, depending on severity, could be a MAD scenario. Oh the irony. They don't have nukes and don't need to drop nukes on us since we might have to repeatedly nuke ourselves into oblivion just to get of them. Oh yeah, this will only affect the surface. Someone or something will need to go down into the sewers or any underground structures, passages, caves, etc. to clean up the whole place...
I don't know much about Xeno's. But I think the way a new Queen is made, is the Alpha male after the death of the Queen starts to transform into a .... Female, thus Queen. EDIT: I guess I should of seen the above post ..
Seeing what they are capable of in the games we are fucked. In the comics they infected a bunch of whale like animals and you had the buggers swatting dropships like flies.
I suppose that Nikkolas, as the OP, should specify what is going to be valid as canon regarding the less than totally official stuff.
They're 'dangerous but nowhere near world ending'. It's a hammer scenario. You come down on the fuckers hard, just total war them. It's flat out impossible for them to do much of their cheeky shit when the number of enemy combatants is just too high to get anywhere near them without it being a general engagement. You'll have to toss aside the modern allergy to casualties, but that's not exactly going to be hard when aliens are invading and using people as grisly incubators to explode out of. Just 'storm the castle'. Launch a massive assault, take the casualties, don't let up, and kill fucking everything.
I would imagine the only serious casualties would be the messy job of clearing out hive/urban areas. If no-one is in the mood it would otherwise be a case of making a ring of steel and turning the inside of it into a deep hole.
Their acid blood and drool (I think the drool was corrosive as well at least) is able to easily burn through how much reinforced future metal alloys again? A drop of blood went through multiple decks on the Nostromo in Alien. A sacrificed xeno's body contents managed to melt right through the floor of a containment cell that was specifically designed with these bastards in mind. Also, in Aliens we see that they have way more strength than you'd think, considering how they could pound into bulkheads and cause the dents they did. IMO, as a tanker, I'd be pretty fucking worried if a couple of xenomorphs hopped onto my track. The frontal armor (hull, skirts, glacis) are all pretty tough, but where the xenos would be attacking, the top, is muuuuch thinner. The loader's hatch on an M1 is about 1cm thick of steel, 1.5-2cm tops (it's been a few years now since I last touched a tank). They wouldn't even need the blood to get though that since they could probably brute force the bitch open. The TC's hatch is a bit tougher, but still going to have similar problems. The back deck where the engine is will be ridiculously vulnerable as well. The periscopes, CITV, and Gunner's Primary Sight are all easily destroyed by xenos looking to pry open the tank open. Oh, and that's all assuming the tank is buttoned up. You generally have someone standing out of a hatch to maintain situational awareness. Even with the highspeed CROWS that's available for the TUSK, the situational awareness sucks when buttoned up. Xenos have, in every instance ever shown, displayed a tendency to catch a victim the moment they are vulnerable, especially when they don't think they are. Shit, just killing them with the driver's weapon (running shit over) is liable to cause a mobility kill by totally fucking your tracks up. In short, being careless with xenos in an M1 will result in... A deadlined engine and/or tracks (mobility kill) Fucked situational awareness while buttoned up due to loss of sensors and such. And having the hatches melted/ripped apart. Very quick loss of loader and/or TC. Gunner gets the pleasure of hearing the TC and loader get ripped apart behind him. Driver gets the distinctly horrifying experience of being the last guy on the crew to be killed in a horrible manner, unless he blows his brains out. What's the crew got available to them once the the TC and loader are exposed? Their M9s. Pistols. What happens to people that shoot pistols into xenos when they're on top of them? They end up being horribly maimed and/or killed by the acid blood.
I like how you guys assume this is going to happen in a section of the world where we can rapidly detect and mobilize against the Xenomorphs, instead of say... The Amazon, or sub-equatoral Africa, or SE Asia, or any one of a hideous list of hellholes where they'll go unnoticed long enough to become a massive problem that even carpet nuking might not kill off.
Dealing with them in numbers is going to require aerial destruction, either nukes or enough conventional ordnance to come close. Killing them with present-day small arms is grossly impractical. They're moderately armored, apparently immune to shock, will do whatever the Queen tells them to, and only go down for good if you blow them to bits or take out/off the head. Wounding them just multiplies their danger. And they won't necessarily fix in place to be hit with heavier weapons, either. Plus they scare the shit out of people, so you can expect infantry ammo loads to go even quicker.
Their drool isn't acidic but they can certainly spit acid a fair distance. From what I've seen though the spitting acid isn't nearly as strong as the stuff that's in their blood.
Wouldn't the standard 5.56mm round used in most assault rifles be hilariously ineffective at killing them? I've heard bits and pieces around here that the lethality rate of that type of ammunition is pretty dismal.
Getting rid of them will be nasty, but not impossible. How nasty is heavily dependant on their ability to spawn a queen and quickly you spot it and react.
Well in a novel it took them to destroy San Fransico to finally kill the Queen. The Queen had an IQ of 175.
I actually did mention that this is where the main problem would be; places where they can grab up hosts where nobody would notice for a good long while. Personally, I was working under the assumption that this was happening in multiple points around the globe, some urban, some sub-urban, some farmland/boonies, some wilderness. Ideally, yes, you'd want to pound the things from the air or with indirect. But yes, you're correct in that they'd be hard as fuck to pin down in a manner that actually make for efficient use of heavy ordinance. I imagine that we'd get pretty good pretty fast, by necessity, at containing them with the intentions of trying to do just that, though. As for being armored, not really all that much. Those 10mm HEDP rounds from the pulse rifles splatted them pretty easily with a burst. Based on what I've read in the Tech Manual the penetration on those rounds isn't all that stellar since their primary means of killing is getting inside a soft target and exploding. They're also meant to be as compact as possible in order to maximize capacity per mag (since pulse rifles have obscene RoFs). Hell, pistol rounds are quite capable of penetrating and killing them at close range. So they probably have, at best, like Level II armor equivalent exoskeletons. Yes, you are right, though, that shock doesn't seem to do jack nor shit. They get injured they just keep coming until they're too physically broken to keep doing it. Blow off a limb and now you've got a limb spurting acid blood. Now that I think about it...just how long would it take a xeno drone to die from blood loss alone? Eh, it'd suck, but that dog would still hunt. You'd just need to pump more rounds into them. At the very least their heads are about as easy to hit as their torsos, and those heads seem to pop without too much trouble. I definitely see a come back for full auto assault rifles in the west, though. 5.56 mostly has issues because of failure to fragment sufficiently using NATO-spec ammo + short barrels + non-optimal rifling twist. If it fragments properly it can make for some nasty wounds, but then that's the trick of it. Still, it does fall short when it hits something that won't let it fragment since it doesn't tend to have the mass to make up for it. This is one of those fun cases where police forces that have no qualms about using expanding 5.56 would have a bit of an edge. Granted, most of them will need it to only partially make up for their general lack of training for tactical shit.
Doesn't most aerial support stuff rely on thermal though? Unless you're planning on carpet bombing the area (probably the preferable option for some if not most situations) you'd probably need infantry on scene to target them for aircraft with smoke or lasers, because apparently they don't show up on thermal at all. Actually come to think of it, don't most MBTs rely on thermal scopes and the like? I can't possibly imagine how much this would suck at night.... Depends on where you shoot them. At one point Vasquez pumped something like a quarter of a clip directly into one's face at close range and all they did was bounce off with visible sparks.
Well, just because they can somehow blend with the thermal background it doesn't mean their movement can't be spotted. I'm willing to bet when they move they stop blending so well. Modern thermals can be quite sensitive, so it's quite possible to still track them using thermals, so long as they aren't perfectly still like they were when they ambushed the marines, albeit limitedly. That said, most militaries are heavily reliant upon non-thermal optics as well. NVGs are a big one. However, observers would probably be still be quite leaned upon, but it's not like that's not already the case as is. Huh. I don't recall that. Next time I watch Aliens I'll look for that. Okay, so they probably have might have Level IIIA in some parts then.
