ThanatosRa wrote:a spider the size of a buick
I'll take this and up you with
Actual space spiders. None of this 'I must breathe o2' shit. They arrive via event, space dust (instead of sand/ore remnants, space eggs are interspersed in that and hatch when exposed to vacuum), or larger meteors. The babies are all player controlled spiderlings, basically. They grow exceedingly slow default to maturation but can(and should) consume eachother to get bigger, faster. Initial maturation you get spiders the size we are used to presently. But they need to find and consume their brothers still to reach the next tier of big-fucking-space-spider. Babies and eggs dying on the edge of the station should be a natural and usually benign process; they hatch and starve/die off in their environment easily. They are not predators.
Notes- They live in space, and are harmed by the atmosphere within a station proper.
-They do not need to 'eat' outside of power from wires. Their nests are made (commonly) on solars, where they can tap right into the feeds. The effect should be a blocking of said solar wing 'upriver' of the silk-webbing-whatever. Spider heals on said nest, and also grows faster. Growing the webbing to encompass/block more solar branches will give a stronger nest, but will noticeably block most/all of the energy to the solar SMES and get human attention. Maybe when you are the size of a buick you can eat electricity in peace....
-They consume their brothers for biomass alone to get larger, not out of a dietary or nutritional requirement.
-Engineers can harvest the nests partially for 'charged' webbing silk whatever. R&D uses, or maybe the wire is extra durable and when used in lieu of cable coils, has increased properties (longer cable restraint removal, wire in maint laid with this would require repeated snipping to cut/does not falter to mice teeth, I dunno this is a rough idea).
--Harvesting partially means you don't destroy the webbing nest, wherever it is, but you gain a small fragment of the silk. Space-spider habitats are not dependent upon (but are greatly helped by) Humans or advanced space-faring societies, meaning hostile responses only happen if the nest is threatened and thus the spiders food supply. No humans maintaining the solar wing also means no power in the wiring more than likely, and thus no food and little growth/maturation.
WIP concepts: Space-spiders begin to accrue electrical-based abilities/traits, including tesla-like nests. The nests eventually may give off their own charge if large/old enough.
-Buick-sized final stage space-spiders are likewise non-predatory, organically, but may easily start to cover the outside of the station in in large swathes of webbing, which may or may not be problematic (breaches would be much less worrisome, maybe).
-At that point, it may not be a good idea to harass the giant spider and just make sure the solar wing is running so it's happy.
-Final stage spider may leave eggs/create nodules out of stored energy-matter, which engineers can harvest for makeshift batteries, lights, food, cargo $$$$, or grenades.
-Aggressively combats space-carp, the organisms sharing a habitat and naturally feuding for differing reasons.
tl;dr space spiders that eats energy from wires on solar or maint if starving.
