Talk:Aliens

Trivia Note: In the Aliens series of movies this weapon always seems to be a hazard. i.e. shooting an alien with this weapon would cause a character to get splattered with acidic blood. This event happens a lot in AVP: Requiem. However, in reality, a direct shotgun blast would NOT splatter any blood "towards the shooter" or "to the sides". The force alone would direct all brain and blood splatter AWAY from the shooter. All one has to do is look a real life crime scene photos of shotgun blasts to the head. All particles or viscera are blown away from the barrel, none are to the front and very little if any is to the sides.

Additional Trivia Note: As the previous trivia note says, little 'splashback' if any would be expected. That said, the Aliens are well known to be extremely tough beasties, so who's to say parts of the body were not damaged very much by the shotgun blasts? This could have resulted in the 'splashback' as softer tissue and blood rebounds off harder bone / chitinous tissue...

Remember reading in a book or online when I was in school that the aliens had extremely high "blood pressure" resulting in them pretty much exploding when shot and in effect turning them into a walking anti personnel mine.

Even if they are under pressure, the blast would blow the blood AWAY. I shot a pressurized Paint balloon with a shotgun for a demo once. Sure it flew everywhere EXCEPT where I was because the blast of the shotgun forced the particulate matter in the other direction. I am very wary of any theory that has the alien blood at such high pressure that it can overcome the kinetic energy of a shotgun blast. Wouldn't happen.MoviePropMaster2008 21:09, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

In accordance with the statement above mine, the aliens blood is in fact, highly pressurized. Coincidence? I think not. I'd think of it as more of a natural deterrent, or biological "fail-safe" due to the fact that if a Xenomorph is attacked and killed, or even injured, the aggressor will pay the price.

Physicist's note: According to the character Bishop, the creatures' blood completely oxidizes as of their death. Presumably, this is due to direct exposure to external atmospheric conditions, but that's just a moot guess at a fictitious alien. In any case, oxidation, along with its reduction counterpart, is the neutralization of an acidic compound of a which results in the release of chemical energy (also known as redoxing).

Familiar examples of this in the real world include the process in cellular respiration that oxidizes glucose to carbon dioxide and the corresponding reduction of oxygen to water. An example of a counterpart to the process is its inverse in photosynthesis. In agriculture, ammonia is oxidized into nitric acid--which, incidentally, is also useful as an explosive, but I'll get to that. It's the fundamental reaction behind an electrochemical battery. In some cases, it releases an enormous amount of heat.

Suppose all of the glucose and oxygen in your blood were to suddenly redox. You would have a lot of energy on hand, and I suspect it would really hurt. The impression that our android hero gives me is that these aliens are walking fertilizer bombs, which is hardly the worst thing I can think of (we've got the equivalent and worse in many insect species on Earth), but still an excellent defense mechanism. I don't think it's the shockwave of the shotgun that is causing the backsplash of acid, it would be the onset of the oxidation of the acid itself.