ALIENS...could the juggarnaut survive the nuclear blast?

Yes. The blast was centered deep underground, below the atmosphere processor. Most of the residual blast went straight up. The colony was also built to withstand extreme weather conditions, so a lot of it survived too.

The derelict was "out past the illum range". Which I took as at least a decent distance away.

I always thought of this as a weak point in [b]"Aliens"[/b], too [i]or[/i] that it would otherwise support the theory that Weyland Yutani indeed knew about the derelict ship when building [b]Hadley's Hope[/b]. With all that advanced technology at hand, wouldn't they have scanned the entire surface of such a relatively small planetoid that is LV-426? An object of that size should most certainly have showed up and not [i]'accidentially'[/i] be discovered by some random terraforming 'farmers'.

Hal- I found that to be a weak point too. My thinking was that they were sent there to " accidentally" discover the derelict when the time was right, because they knew it was there. So perhaps Weyland themselves kept its presence a secret while they got things up and running, which of course is not supported in the story and also makes no sense. So I just wasted your time on an entire paragraph. I think the Juggernaut can withstand a nuclear blast. If it was my story, I'd have the thing pretty much indestructible. It certainly took a beating in Prometheus, not bad given it was underground for millennia.

If I may, A:CM had the juggernaut surviving the blast. In all honesty I agree that it could survive the blast. I also agree that the derelict being not known about was a weak point but I like to think that since lv 426 and the beacon was known about since the time Prometheus mission was happening that weyland-yutani ended up putting that colony there to eventually get an Alien for study there and eventually back to Earth

I think they knew about it because of the colony being on the same planetoid. I bet people were told in the beginning to stay away from the juggernaut/derelict ship because of the danger inside of it. They kinda did a whole Area 51 with it but only people knew about ET existence but were paid to look the other way.

We do know that somehow Weyland-Yutani knew about the juggarnaut otherwise they would not have redirected the Nostromo to aquire the alien lifeform for their bioweapons division. Therefore they must have set up Hadley's hope as a host colony for xenomorphs that they already knew were there in the first place. This is the only explanation that is consistent with the storylines in the first couple of movies in the series, which were the true cannon.

In defence of not detecting the juggarnaut . The surface has loads of raised peaks, perhaps when they scanned the ground it wasn't that obvious. It could of just looked like the terrain. It does have an organic shape . I think when they heard ripleys story they sent someone out to have a look at the area were they found the juggarnaut. Or they could of checked the black box on the escape ship. I think they signal they detected from LV426 (regarding weyland files) was a well kept secret. Perhaps only weyland and a few knowing. When weyland died in prometheus , his secret died with him.

@Major Noob: You haven't wasted any of my time (if that's what you meant), as I'm always interested in hearing your opinion. On topic, I forgot to highlight that I also believe the [b]derelict ship[/b] (I prefer that term in this context since it was called that way back then) could have survived the blast. Its distance from [b]Hadley's Hope[/b] was, I believe so, much greater than it was from the [b]Nostromo's[/b] original landing spot. Also, it looked pretty [i]stirdy[/i] and was built using [i]far[/i] more advanced technology. Furthermore, and as Major Noob stated, it took a fair beating in [b]Prometheus[/b], although that obviously wasn't [i]'canon'[/i] when [b]Aliens[/b] was written. @pulserifle187: You may have a point there, but in this context to me it just emphasises that the [b]derelict ship[/b] even moreso could have survived the blast, as [b]LV-426's[/b] geological structure would actually have served as additional protection. As for its detection, I think the technology they used was far more capable than just aerial photography/visual surveillance. The very alien structure at that size would have showed up in other spectral scans such as ultraviolet, thermal or chemical (and that's just today's technology). Another scene I remember (maybe not 100% correctly) is where those two guys talk about that plot of land where [b]Mr. Jorden[/b] claimed to have [i]found something[/i]. Wasn't that plot of land deliberately assigned to him just when the 'time was right'? The other thing supporting a conspiracy of Weyland-Yutani knowing about the findings on LV-426 is the fact that they put a total KNOB, that being [b]Carter Burke[/b], plus a very inexperienced [b]Lt. Gorman[/b] in charge of the whole operation. And isn't it also pretty obvious that [b]Burke[/b] had clear orders to return a specimen?? But that must have been said a thousand times by now around here...

for me, the Derelict (in fact all Space Trucker technology) is like Tolkien's THE ONE RING i.e. there's no way you can simply hammer it flat with brute force, you have to send it back to where it was made for 'molecular deconstruction' in the fires of Mount Doom. :)

The ship did survived thanks to Aliens Colonial Marines including Hadley's Hope so if anyone has heard of the game then yes it did survived.

The ship was clearly some distance from Hadley's Hope and we have seen how substantial these ships are from the crash in Prometheus which did little damage to it other than knock it out of the sky. We've seen that Hadley's Hope did survive somewhat damaged in Colonial Marines, so I think it is safe to say the Derelict would have survived pretty much undamaged from the thermonuclear explosion. On a slight tangent, one thing that didn't sit entirely comfortable to me was if, in Alien, the Nostromo detected a beacon (regardless of whether it had strayed there or been sent there by W-Y) what happened to the beacon? It wasn't like Dallas, Kane and Lambert were there long enough to really investigate or turn off any beacon. Surely the colonists would have detected that and investigated the derelict before being sent there by Carter Burke in Aliens? Have I missed something here??

B.S.D- apparently when the Derelict is shown in Aliens it is severely damaged by volcanic activity. I don't remember this but then I havent seen Aliens in many years, and so many here have said it that it must be true, thus we can assume its beacon was destroyed. You'd think they would have had other means of detecting something so foreign, and being a Weyland project, their employers certainly knew it was there. Is this a mysterious, sinister plot or a *GASP* big glaring "plot hole" in the beloved Aliens movie? Depends on your point of view...