Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
The indiscipline of Drake and Vasquez serves to illustrate the effects of a breakdown in trust and effective command resulting from having a buttterbar in charge of a mission that clearly requires field experience. Also, while I appreciate that there might be some extended footage showing the drop ship causing the problem with the reactor, without that footage we are forced to conclude that Drake and Vasquez cause the problem. Again, the problem goes back to the mission leadership. Gorman failed to make good decisions, thereby creating the window of opportunity for the catamity that befalls his command and the mission.
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If the alien drone hadn't wiped out the dropship crew in-flight the damage the smart gunners' fire may or may not have done to the reactor's cooling systems would have been irrelevent anyway because immediately after most of the Colonial Marines are wiped out in the fight in the nest, Cpl Hicks (the ranking Marine still conscious) agreed with Ripley to head back to the Sulaco and nuke the site from orbit. So the same end result would have occurred anyway. Its like Schrodinger's cat. If the dropship hadn't crashed there would have been a nuclear explosion either from the cooling system damage (if indeed the cooling system had been damaged by the Marines' fire) or from a nuclear warhead.
The dropship crashing meant that the mission suddenly became sharply time-critical, also for a variety of reasons. The survivors were almost certain to have been overrun some time that night even if the reactor didn't go critical.