Why does an android need to be in a stasis pod? David was not in stasis in Prometheus. Ash was in stasis, but the company did not want the Nostromo crew to know that he was an android. But in Aliens, everyone on the Sulaco (except Ripley at first) knows Bishop is an android. So why is he in a stasis pod?
Uh you answered your own question, so the other crew would not know he was a synthetic.
EDIT:Doh! Well how long do the synthetics live? Maybe there is a reason why you’d prefer them not to waste time puttering around an empty ship?
Bishop being a synthetic was explicitly not a secret, IIRC.
Was he in stasis for the outgoing trip? I don’t recall.
He might prefer to sleep through the trip rather than twiddle his thumbs by himself.
Save power / service life.
Incidents like the one with Ash might have resulted in Company protocols saying a synthetic can’t be the only one awake.
Still, an android could simply be programmed to sit down in a chair and shut down. It wouldn’t need to enter cryonic suspension like the living crew would.
But they aren’t androids in the traditional sense, they are synthetic lifeforms. They aren’t filled with wires and metal parts for example but liquid and bladders.
It is possible they can’t just sit in a chair and shutdown, not without their body aging or requiring sustenance.
But if that’s the case, what’s the point in even having them? What makes them superior to humans?
You can program them to do truly abhorrent things that even marines wouldn’t do.
re: the OP, even if they didn’t otherwise “age,” sitting in a chair without moving for eight solid years is going to cause some serious spreading. People would laugh.
Knife tricks.
Well, Ash (Alien) seemed to have slightly superior-to-human strength.
Bishop (Aliens) had slightly superior-to-human manual dexterity.
Annalee (Alien Resurrection) had… a datalink in her forearm, I guess.
They all showed better-than-human durability, “surviving” damage that would have killed a human.
And Prometheus is so utterly fucked up in concept and execution that any similarity to the Aliens franchise is, I figure, purely coincidental.
Real answer: Because they needed the ‘reveal’ of Bishop being an android to be at a specific point in the story, namely after everyone awakens from hypersleep but before much anything else. So is there any obvious reason why he wouldn’t/couldn’t be in hypersleep for the ride out there? No, not really. Ipso-facto that’s why he was. Like the writers in Star Trek called it ‘plot drive’ it’s purely a dramaturgical device, a necessary plot point that isn’t overly conflicting with any aspect of its fictional universe.
Hate to be a killjoy, but that’s all it comes down to…
except that if they had the issue in mind they could simply not show him getting out of a pod.
Maybe ninety days of constant fan-wanking would have wore his fingers to the bone.
I misremember: did they imply Bishop had been with them for awhile? Maybe that’s how they program them: put a black slate in a stasis and “download” it with personality over the trip? I know they’re not robots, but they’re close-ish, right?
It’s obvious that none of you have ever worked with the military.
Their regulations presumably state that all crew must remain in stasis for the duration of the trip. These regulations presumably predate androids serving alongside Marines in any capacity being a commonplace thing, or perhaps before androids could be considered crew rather than equipment.
So, androids become part of the crew, and the crew must remain in stasis.
They’ve been meaning to update that reg for some time now, but the review process just takes such a long time, and they’ve had more important things on their plates…
Maybe the Sulaco was sufficiently technologically advanced that it didn’t need a crew member awake for the entire trip, while the Prometheus needed someone around for maintenance and emergencies.
On the Prometheus, David had been tasked with determining a root language for talking to the then-speculative Engineers during the trip out. Maybe he would have been in stasis too if not for this requirement.
He took in food of a sort, didn’t he? Maybe it’s just about preserving resources. And just because he was in the pod doesn’t mean he got suspended the way the humans did. Maybe he did just shut down while in there.
According to the Colonial Marines Technical Manual part of the reason might be because of a quirk in the nature of the FTL drive—to an outside observer, time would seem to pass much faster onboard the Sulaco when traveling FTL. Hypersleep is used partially to conserve resources, but also to prevent excessive crew aging.
(Note that while the CMTM is licensed, and very well written, this part is conjecture—no such details of FTL operation actually appear in any of the Aliens-verse movies.)
(Additional fun note: The Sulaco’s FTL cruising speed, as listed, works out to about Warp 9.04 in the modern official Star Trek scale—which itself, admittedly, is actually a bit pokey when you consider the distances and times traveled as stated on the show.)
Or maybe he just lay there and played WoW for 19 years.
I did that, one night.