Worm: Prey 14.4, Word of God

There wasn’t much my bugs could do.  They settled on Crawler and found his flesh impenetrable.  I began preparing web nets, drawing lines of silk between my airborne bugs.  Amy’s relay bugs had afforded me the chance to pick up far more bugs than I otherwise might have.  My attention flickered over my swarm.

Nearly a million spiders.

[...]

He’s big, he’s strong, he’s ridiculously tough, but he’s no Leviathan.

My spiders began weaving their threads into braids, the flying bugs directing them in and through loops of silk as the threads spooled out.  Where bugs couldn’t hover, they directed their flight into tight corkscrews to slow themselves.

[...]

Even in the scope of a single neighborhood, my power extending for roughly a thousand feet in every direction, it made us all seem tiny.

[...]

Crawler’s pause to grab concrete had bought me time to get my bugs into position.  They swept over Crawler, laying down braided ropes of silk joined by adhesive lines and thin gossamer.  Even caterpillars began offering their assistance, using the silk they produced for cocoons.

He was a big guy, but it was a lot of silk.

I could see how it hampered his movements.  There was even something approximating surprise on his face as he dropped down so all six legs were firmly on the ground, and his forelimbs didn’t extend as far as he’d expected.  He tried to run and found himself hampered further.

Crawler sported two or three tons of physical prowess, and his power had fine tuned him into a physical specimen like few others.  My bugs had millions of years of evolution to refine the quality of their silk and their ability to produce it.

For now, at the very least, I had the advantage.

[...]

I chanced a look over my shoulder and regretted it.  Crawler was bound tighter than ever, caught by my bugs, but the look threw me off-balance.

[...]

Crawler, still bound, was unable to tear through the silk as fast as the millions of spiders were connecting it.  If there was only a way to stop the bombing, I could do something to pin him down, buy time for the heroes to arrange more permanent accommodations.

—Worm: Prey 14.4



Look at it this way:
What they’re doing is extracting silk by force. Get the spider, hook it up to the machine, extract the silk by force. No control over the spinnerets, so it’s basically standard goop with none of the spider’s technique behind it. They then wove 96 strands at a time into threads, and wove those threads into the cloth.
The silk extraction machine doesn’t remove every drop of silk. That’s fine to them because they’ll be using the same spiders a bit later to produce more, so it works out. Here, she can afford to/compel the spiders to, and she’s got a hell of a lot more spiders. Taylor’s producing finer cords (both through spinnerets and more, finer threads, and instead of making them into fabric, she’s making them into a net. Crawler isn’t -covered-, but it’s enough to prevent his range of movement. If he pulls, the strands stretch – between the flexibility and the strength of the material, they remain pretty durable. Anything that snaps gets connected back to the net or to Crawler. If he gives any slack at all, then more strands are connected so he can’t return to the position he was holding before and he loses ground.
In terms of effectiveness, think in terms of layers of chicken wire that are being pulled tight, with every snapped segment being reconnected/tied to the existing structure.
Big as he is, one needs leverage to exert the full extent of their strength.
That’s my interpretation, anyways. If you don’t buy it you might have to just dismiss this as comic book science, yeah.

—Word of God: Wildbow, John Charles McCrae
	Source: https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/prey-14-4/#comment-4228
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