Cobb's concepts

From:

The Design Of The Derelict
and 
Early Alien Artwork

a) Cobb's problem as an alien spaceship designer.

1. Dan O'Bannon: "The only problem was that he was a rationalist. I noticed this when we first started designing the picture. All these different things he as doing were coming out so well that I decided to have him  take a crack at the derelict spaceship. But when I asked him to come up with an irrational shape he got very disturbed. He couldn't handle that. He kept coming up with convincing technology for a flying saucer or some other kind of UFO." (Cinefex 1, p43)

b)  Ron Cobb created two paintings that featured his designs for derelict space crafts.

Alien derelict

b i) An alien derelict:
A design for the alien derelict space craft made up from curved shapes that could easily contain the space jockey design that he created.

1. Future life #23 in an article about Ron Cobb mentions briefly that craft was to be destroyed, without any further word about this.

Manmade derelict -"Black Ship and Cylinder"

b ii)) "Black Ship and Cylinder"
A concept painting showing the remains of a manmade ship and a cylindrical tower with human explorers wandering around shining their torches.

1. The Book of Alien says about this picture that the searchers find a lost Earth base where previous travelers fought a losing battle with aliens.
2. In Starburst 14, 1979,  John Brosnan was handed a script by the publisher of the Alien novelisation and he mistakingly believed it was the original script but it was instead was a rewrite by Giler and Hill . His words about it were:"The original script reveals that the eggs are a part of a genetic engineering experiment being carried out by the same Earth company that employs the crew of the Nostromo. The company is illegally involved in a project to create a perfect killing machine - the "alien" of the title. Unknown to the crew of the Nostromo the ship has been programmed to pick up one of the eggs, activate it and return the resulting creature to the company headquarters. The crew themselves  are merely expendable guineau pigs being used to see just how effective the company's deadly creation is. But the crew or some of them, learn the truth when they discover that one of their number is actually a robot working under the direct orders of the company."
3. At the bottom of the painting as shown in the Alien from the Quadrilogy DVD set released in 2003, there is a copy of the picture and presents at the bottom of the picture the ominous words "Black ship and cylinder". This painting was a concept for a different version of the script than the final one.
4. A copy of a script featuring the black ship and the cylinder enters my hands on 31st January, 2011 (many thanks to Valaquen of Strange Shapes). The description of the alien derelict has been made much simpler, into the form of a human built space craft. The black ship is a new version of an L-52 craft, perhaps named after the B-52 bomber. In this scenario, the old L-52 craft is known to generally go with a compliment of seven people. The disfigured remains of one dead human astronaut are discovered. So it is revealed that in this script, the egg silo is replaced by a concrete cylinder, is said in the script to be a government model 503, with the silo beneath the ground. When Dallas arrives at the top, he discovers a wheel recessed into contiguous pillbox with spokes shaped to accept clutching hands. When turned, a few meters away an opening appears in the Cylinder's surface. Down below he finds the egg silo, with a plinth on the ground upon which are rows of the leathery urns, the spores