Cameron himself has said that Aliens is a Viet Nam War movie in space and the influences are pretty clear. If you’ve got the DVD it comes up in the interviews on there.
Nope. The crash of their troop transport resulted in the destruction of the entire installation. Bishop says as such.
True, and it shows. When they were directly following Gorman’s orders, they sucked ass. But when Gorman was out of the picture, they kicked ass. Ergo, Gorman was the problem, not the individual marines.
We don’t judge the entire group based on the example of the worst of the group, after all.
But then they would have been disobeying Gorman’s orders to go in and find the colonists. So again, they either obey orders and get into a bad situation, or disobey orders and maybe do better, but are still bad soldiers for not following directions. Huh?
Actually, the modern millitary only uses a single rifle round for its regular forces’ firearms at a time, a select FMJ round. Standard millitary forces get that one round, and only that one round. Special forces tend to have slightly better degree of flexibility, but even then are usually restricted to a single type of round. The only weapons that generally have more than a single type of round availible are heavy ordinance, such as tanks and artillery. A group of USCM marines out on their own on a “bug hunt” would have no reason to be issued special ordinance. There isn’t a group of hostile civilians requiring crowd-suppressive techniques, there is no armor or air units that couldn’t be zapped from space, and there isn’t any role remaining that a 10x24mm caseless armor-piercing explosive round can’t take down in enough quantity. There really isn’t much -need- for a different rifle round.
The main reason the whole thing went to hell was Burke and Gorman. Burke was there for the company, and didn’t share -anything- that he knew before hand, so they were all going in with no intel. Further, the company pretty much lied, giving more reason to believe it was simply a cake-walk. As such, it would be the perfect mission to send an inexperienced and rather green Gorman in to run the op, so he could be better experienced for “real” fighting. And when he orders them not to use their guns, they’ve still got three flamers, a shotgun, a handfull of pistols, and (Especially!) a pair of smartguns. Not as nice as having a few more pulse rifles, but they (Or more correctly, Gorman) were opperating still in the mindset that it was a simple mission where they just had to find the colonists and make sure everything was fine, not some huge fight.
As for the other scenarios…
Aliens vs. Star Trek:
Let’s see… In TOS, the ship and crew is lost. They seemed to have only marginally better internal sensors than the Nostromo, and couldn’t even handle the tribbles quickly. Having some alien bursting out of hatches and ventalation ducts at random would slaughter the crew quickly. On the plus side, a single good phaser blast would vaporize the alien with no traces, so you don’t have to worry about the acid blood.
TNG. The Enterprise-D seems to get boarded every third or so episode, so you’d think they’d be good at handling it, but they rarely if ever just do something simple like erect a force field around the intruders. Instead they send security teams. They’ll know right where it is from internal sensors (Unless the aliens somehow figure out how to kill those. Cutting the power on a starship would be pretty nasty). With those inaccurate phasers, a quick surprise attack by a single alien could kill the typical ~3-man security team before they can fire. And heaven help you if they cocoon someone like Worf, who would probably be in that first security team.
DS9. They’d probably have the best chance. The “main characters” generally seem more adapt at fighting, and while Picard seems to be great at starship tactics, Sisko seems to be as good for tactical combat (Maybe). Plus they’re by a planet used to gurilla warfare, so they’s somewhat familiar with the tactics the alien would be using. Still wouldn’t be a pretty scene, and if the alien isn’t taken out quick, there seem to be lots of places on that station it could hide while hatching some friends.
Voyager. Ugh. Well, they seemed to be the least effective in tactical combat. But they have better internal sensors, as well. I see this going about as well as TNG, maybe a bit worse.
Enterprise. Like TOS, but worse. Even poorer sensors, and no vaporizing phasors. LOTS of places for the bugs to hide in. Bye-bye…
As for USCM vs. Star Trek… Well, it’d be about the same as the aliens, but much, much worse. Phasers just don’t compare to pulse rifles and smartguns. The only way I see the federation winning that one is to errect force fields around all the intruders, which as I mentioned, they seem to be very, very reluctant to do. Barring forcefields, the ST guys are toast. The USMC gear is incredibly lethal.
The reason our military uses the FMJ round is because of the Geneva Convention - it’s less damaging than softer slugs. The rounds described in the movie most definitely do NOT abide the restrictions on anti-personnel rounds made by the Geneva Convention, so I’m assuming they no longer follow those rules for war.
One would assume these marines would often be called upon to fight on spacecraft or in other situations where armor piercing explosive rounds could endanger them by destroying life support systems. It stands to reason they would have some kind of bullets made for those kinds of situations, like those used by sky marshalls.
I don’t think they’d need different ammo. Ships are -extremely- rarely boarded, as they’re most often killed long before you would have the chance of boarding them (It’d be like the crew of one nuke sub boarding and siezing another sub). Stations they’d certainly attack, but look at Gateway some time. That isn’t some fragile ISS-like craft. Those walls are thick. Not solid, obviously, but the pulse rifle’s 10mm round detonates immediatly after penetrating, and the external wall would almost surely be tough enough to take the fragmentation (It’s designed to protect the station from orbital debris, after all). So they might not -need- it. I imagine at best they might have some inert 10mm rounds designed, of course, but I don’t know if a combat unit would have them availible to them. They weren’t planning on any zero-/hostile-atmosphere engagements, after all.
But even when Vasquez and Drake went rock-and-roll with their 10x28mm smartguns (More powerfull than the pulse rifles), they still didn’t cause that catastrophic blow-up they had been worried about. It was good to be worried about it, but I think Gorman would have been better to tell them -why- they should be watching their fire, and count on them keeping their bursts short and controlled. Or even told them to fall back and try to make new plans that didn’t leave them vulnerable. But if anything, you don’t order a squad of Marines to do something and then blame them when they go and do just what they were ordered to do…
Colonial Marines, not Space Marines.
Well, some inventive soul already posted this little story way back in the day…