Narcissus ending

[NERMAL]

Yeah, it's been a while, but sometimes a thought pops into my head that I can't quite put down.

How much air does the shuttle hold? I watch the scene again and again and it never twigged before that after a second or two of explosive decompression that there is still a steady flow of air going out the door that the alien is struggling against. I'm sure someone smarter than me could do the math (volume times speed of sound less density etc).

And on that same scene, Ripley shoots it with a harpoon which gets buried in the critters abdomen. Why didnt it's blood melt the harpoon?

[deezelboy]

Hey, the Alien's not connected to the harpoon gun's cable by the point that its trying to climb into the engine nacelle, so I'd assume it's managed to corrode through the harpoon by that point.

Decompression: yeah, it's flaky (with hand-waving to follow). Going by the calculations here my own best guess is:

Based on a hole of 1.5 metres squared and a hold full of air of 10 metres cubed, with air temperature at 300 kelvin, it'll take 0.022 seconds for air pressure to fall to 0.5 of what it was, or 0.3 seconds to fall to 0.0001 of what it was - if my dodgy maths are up to much. But if they are, that's a very explosive and rapid decompression!

Hand-waving: the cabin's repressurised later, so the Narcissus is carrying lots of compressed air. When the shuttle decompresses, life support tries to compensate by pumping more compressed air into the shuttle.

[SM]

It is still connected actually.  I always thought it'd corroded away by that point, but in the CU when Ripley fires the engines you can still see the cable at left of frame.

Strong harpoon....

As for the decompression, it's 3 or 4 seconds before the Alien is making its way back into the cabin when Ripley nails it.  It's not a steady flow.  The angle on Ripley shows bits and pieces floating around behind her in a breeze of sorts.

[NERMAL]

Thanks. I'll go back into hibernation now...