lionhead

Question: Curious on why the surgical equipment doesn't melt when removing the Queen chest burster from Ripley when she has acidic blood?

Answer: This is just speculation (and I haven't watched the movie for ages) but the operation is done with medical equipment in a facility designed for studying Aliens, which the military knows a little about. Maybe it is made of futuristic acid proof material.

If the surgical tools were acid proof, surely the floors of the cells that contain the grown alien specimens would also be acid proof. But that is how they escape: by sacrificing one of their own in order to spill acid blood onto the floor.

Well, you can imagine any acid-proof metal is probably very expensive. They can't make the entire station out of that stuff. Surgical equipment is probably necessary for their research, so they make an exception.

lionhead

Question: Why did the newborn alien kill the Queen but not Ripley?

Answer: Because it didn't recognize the queen as its mother, but it did recognize Ripley as its mother.

lionhead

Question: If Ripley was operated on and an alien removed a few days ago, how come they have a fully grown queen who is laying eggs, 8 to be precise as there are 8 people who have been ingested and turned into aliens? But later, when most of the crew have ejected successfully or been killed when a hand grenade was thrown into their escape pod along with an alien, one of the scientists says there are 12 more? How can that be?

kh1616

Chosen answer: Well firstly the queen was probably genetically engineered, like Ripley herself. A few days might be all the time they need to have a fully grown queen created. Secondly the 8 incubated victims were only the latest batch, they had been incubating people with xenomorphs for quite a time I suspect.

lionhead

With regards to the quick growth of the alien queen, it is standard for the xenomorph in nearly every film they appear (Aliens is the only exception, the only chestburster shown in the film is quickly killed by Apone) to grow to full size in around one day. Presumably the same is true for the queen.

BaconIsMyBFF