The Original wrecked ship

Shaw is oblivious to it being David that infected her lover Holloway on LV223. she assists David in reconnecting his head to his body. While she is in hypersleep, david scours the ship and finds the Xeno samples. He infects her with a facehugger, examines its development, wakes her up after it has disattached, locks her in the exosuit, culminating in a chestburster erupting causing her to crash the ship on LV426. David promptly sets a distress beacon which will eventually be picked up by the Nostromo. it is an important that there is no evidence of nest material onboard this ship, so there could not be a queen. how did the queen lay that many eggs, without food for nest material if they were not already on board as cargo? it must have been David arranging the eggs and the blue mist as a trap for future Wayland executives. He has already stated to Holloway, as he infects him "dont all children want their parents dead?" David seems to admire the Alien Engineers more than his own creators.

It is a bit of both. But not completely related. You'll see.

Shaw is clearly NOT oblivious that David has infected Holloway. We can pinpoint exactly when she realises. It's when Weyland is brought to the ship, and David tells him the air is fine to breath. Shaw raises the possibility that it was airborne infection that killed Holloway, and David says that he knows that the air is not infected. How? Because obviously he knows how David got infected. The look on his face, and on hers shows that they both understand what happened. So, I think we see why she hasn't reattached his head when leaving the ship... he doesn't need arms to translate and instruct her in navigation. (although why she says 'sorry' to him for putting him in a bag, knowing full well he killed her boyfriend is a bit of a mystery... is she very forgiving in a christian way, or just being very unemotional about it, taking into consideration that David was a slave to Weylands orders?) Some of your other points David setting up the derelict on LV 426 could be what is in mind for the sequel, but I'm going to pick holes in it regardless, just so we can have discussion. We don't know that there was no nest material or Queen on the LV426 derelict. Dallas, Lambert and Kane didn't do a full sweep of the ship, they found the bridge, and then an egg chamber and once Kane was impregnated, they got out of there. The Queen may have been in another part of the ship, having laid even more eggs, and gone into hibernation due to lack of food. (We don't know if there were further engineers piled up dead somewhere that she had feasted on earlier. Dallas describes the Space Jockey on LV 426 as fossilised suggesting it's been dead far longer than the gap between the Prometheus mission and Nostromo mission. Of course Dallas could be wrong, because as it turns out, that was a suit, not an exoskeloton. By the way that line "don't all children want their parents dead" was said to Shaw (who was orphaned as a child), not to Holloway... but you raise a good point. I think we're supposed to left guessing at lots of things. And certainly David admires these creatures as superior, in an echo of Ash's admiration for the Xenomorph in the first movie.

It's set in the same universe, but taking a branch off into another direction. I assume that as a gesutre, they will at some stage have one of the alien ships get into trouble and be a candidate for the derelict of LV 426, but I don't think that the writers are working towards their final scene being the opening set up for 'Alien". They are after 'big questions' and using the Alien universe to pose them.

I posted elsewhere today that the original ship left LV223 with some of the engineers and an infected pilot, after one of their own creations/weapons escaped, thus the hologram of the fleeing engineers. You certainly don't see what is chasing them. The ship never escaped the system as the chestburster kills the pilot and the ship crashes on LV426. The remaining crew fall victim to the Alien as it starts its lifecycle creating a Queen.

"It's set in the same universe, but taking a branch off into another direction. I assume that as a gesutre, they will at some stage have one of the alien ships get into trouble and be a candidate for the derelict of LV 426, but I don't think that the writers are working towards their final scene being the opening set up for 'Alien". They are after 'big questions' and using the Alien universe to pose them.: Got to admit Hadley's makes a lot of sense. Good insights and also more subtle than most of what I am reading here. I think that is a dead on explanation regarding elements of Prometheus and alien. The writers are not trying to tie everything together and if they did, both movies would become too predictable. There is nothing worse than when everything fits perfectly leaving nothing to mystery. That is not how life is and art should reflect life. But I still am hoping that they do answer just the question of the derelict ship in the proposed sequel. That much tie in I can stand.