I love how the the origin of the terrifying duct scene in Alien was the guy chasing the beachball through the ducts in Dark Star. All those guys were waiting for was a proper FX budget.

Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Cobb who worked on Dark Star, Star Wars and many others.

You can see similarities between Dark Star sets and Star Wars.

These are the guys that connect Dark Star with Alien with Jodorowsky's Dune.

I feel like the beach ball sub-plot in that movie is a practice-run for Alien. Not to mention the parallels between the conversations with bomb and Ash.

The bomb was the best - This is really interesting, I wish we had more time.