BF2S Forums Armoured Arctic Arachnids

Disturbingly, the Scandinavian spider specialist reports that over that period the polar arachnids have increased significantly in size - and correspondingly increased the thickness of their exoskeletal armour plates. In just one warm year, it seems, you can see a 10 per cent increase: and over the decade that Høye has been visiting the Greenland spider colonies there has been a 2 per cent upward trend, which he puts down to global warming.

On its own this is quite bad enough. We here on the Reg big-game and military tech desk calculate that if the spider-wolves of the Arctic grow by 10 per cent annually**, in just fifty years they will be the size of Humvees. But it gets worse: oh yes.

We aren't just looking at a swarming, ravenous horde of hairy meat-eating arachnids the size of offroad vehicles. That would be easy to deal with, as a well-placed slug from a big-bore rifle would put such a creature down.

In fact, these spiders aren't going to be nearly as easy to kill as a buffalo or a charging elephant. A measly .50-calibre express bullet isn't going to knock one of these puppies down, no sir.

Why? Because spiders, as everyone knows, can actually extrude bulletproof-vest material out of their arses: True fact. And all their hard body structure is worn on the outside, as an exoskeleton, thus forming a natural coat of armour plate.

Thus when the mighty hordes of four-metre-long spiders appear in 2060 or so, they will - by our calculations - be plated with 26cm arachnocomposite protection, in the same league as or better than modern ceramic body armour but immensely thicker.