Talk:Arachne Silk/@comment-25405125-20141015062045/@comment-26097222-20150214124341

Conventional silkworm silk can be used (and has in our world) for bulletproof armor. It wouldn't stop a modern rifle bullet inless you were so padded you could barely move -- and looked like you were wearing a fat suit -- but it will work. On the sort of muskets the tech level of the Empire supports, conventional silk would be a lot more effective. Kevlar is a synthetic fiber that is far stronger, allowing bullet resistant vests but requiring technilogy far beyond the best the Empire has to manufacture. It would stop bullets from muskets quite well, better than it does modern bullets. Spider silk, while it resembles silkworm silk, is vastly stronger. But there is a problem -- spiders are territorial amd if you get enough together to make useful amounts of silk, they kill each other. There are a number of lines of research into producing synthetic spider silk, but few are anywhere near commercial viability. Spider silk would outperform Kevlar in almost every way (Kevlar is as fire resistant as Nomex, something silk is not). But with intelligent spiders smart enough to suppress their territorial instincts? The sky is the limit. In fact, it will likely lead to firearms being abandoned as useless when fighting monsters, resulting in them being used solely for human vs human battles in anti-monster lands. Even the best man-portable firearm from our world would have a very hard time piercing spider silk armor -- and that firearm is easily a hundred times more powerful than the muskets the most technologically advanced nation in the MGE setting can produce.