11-23-2017, 12:00 PM | #11 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
In the real world... searching...
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider-silk/ 70 people caught 1 million golden orb spiders over 4 years and 12 people extracted 80 feet of silk per spider to create one 11 by 4 foot rug. So it's technically doable at any tech level, but it would be stupidly expensive without ultra tech or supernatural means.
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11-23-2017, 12:45 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
You might be able to do it if you had cat-sized spiders (physiologically possible though none have existed to our knowledge). A 5 kilogram spider could produce five grams of spider silk per day, so each captive spider could produce 1.8 kilograms per year. Of course, they would probably need 100 kilograms of insects per year, but the value of the spider silk would probably exceed that of gold, so it would be worth it. In a Low-Tech campaign, spidersilk armor would probably weigh as much as cloth armor but would give 10x the protection against anything but crushing attacks, so it would probably be 1000x as expensive.
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11-23-2017, 01:29 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
Probably not. The strength of spider silk is significantly a factor of spinneret design which likely would not scale like that (we can produce spider silk with genetic engineering, but it doesn't have the performance of natural silk).
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11-23-2017, 02:35 PM | #14 |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
I think he's merely scaling them up for quantity of silk generated, not thickness of strand. They'd still likely create as narrow a strand, just have a greater capacity to generate silk (having a greater mass, silk generation takes a lesser toll on the spider).
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11-23-2017, 03:45 PM | #15 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
The search engine is your friend. This is from 2010.
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=74197 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ... Use the Wired article if you want more detail. "To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today." If I'm reading it correctly, you have 82 people extracting silk for four years to make a single 11x4' piece of cloth that weighs 2.6 lbs. On top of that you need someone to weave the cloth. Here is another tidbit "Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them." The question is whether this machine could be constructed using Low-Tech (TL0-TL4) technology. More "Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of silk" "Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk." It is one of the best articles I've seen for pulling out information that modellers can use. You wouldn't believe the frustration when writing Low-Tech. A lot of the practical information we needed for trying to model various ancient technologies was incredibly hard to find.
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11-23-2017, 05:32 PM | #16 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
One thing I think never mentioned is that I doubt all the workers worked only on that project. They probably had other paying jobs, hobbies, and lives, right?
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11-23-2017, 06:50 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
Quote:
70 people worked for 4 years to gather spiders, on a 260 day work year that's 72,800 days, which is 13.73 spiders collected per day to reach 1 million spiders. I have no idea how many golden orbs a professional spider-wrangler can catch in a day but if I had to guess, I would say 'more than 14'. |
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11-23-2017, 07:09 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
You can have spiders at higher densities then the ones they used. Back in 2009 there was a major infestation in a wastewater treatment plant in Baltimore. 107 million spiders in a 4 acre building.. That makes harvesting easier. Well once you find workers that don't run screaming.
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11-23-2017, 07:47 PM | #19 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
Most spider species are cannibalistic and territorial. Not all, but most.
But for a hypothetical parallel reality, it wouldn't stretch physics to have perfect web producers tolerant of each other.
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11-23-2017, 09:36 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk
I remember some twentyish years ago somebody produced genetically modified goats that produced spider silk in their milk. Mad wizard, yadda, yadda, yadda...
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Tags |
armor, cloth, low-tech, pyramid, pyramid 3/52, pyramid 3/85, silk |
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