OHOTMUDE Request - Spider-Man's web shooters

[icon_uk]

joetuss  requested the OHOTMUDE entry for Spider-Man. Alas that's four pages and the 1/3 rule would make trimming that more trouble than it was worth, so I'm sort of side-stepping the request by using it to showcase something else the Handbooks did magnificently - Technobabble explanations for comic book science. And one of the best examples was


Now when you think about it, Spider-Man's web-shooters are a magnificent piece of hyper-convenient, plot-advancing science fiction. They instantly produce whatever quantity, form and viscosity of web fluid they need to, and can also run out at whatever dramatic moment is required. A simple and ingenious creation from Lee and Ditko there..

The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe went one better than that though, Mark Gruenwald and Eliot Brown (Who did all the technical illustrations) had to come up with a semi=plausible sounding set of MECHANICS for the things, which was not an easy task, and they rose to it magnificently...

Comments

[philippos42]

It's partially battery-powered?

Huh. I don't think I've ever seen that part come up in the story. What happens if the battery is knocked loose?

[leoboiko]

It would be fun to see Spider-man running for the nearest airport/Starbucks to charge his shooter…

Also it must be very well shielded, since being blasted by Electro never fries the circuits.

[icon_uk]

I imagine it's very snugly fitted, since it's screwed into place and has a weatherseal

[silicondream]

I assume that Peter Parker didn't have machined teflon and artificial sapphire parts available to him back in high school? It would be fun to see a similar diagram for his first webshooter models, with bits marked "tin" and "cardboard" and "this amazing material of the future, I think they call it Velcro."

[icon_uk]

His first version was four feet long, weight 80 pounds and was a fiendish combination of supersoaker and paperclips.

YES, the webshooter, what did you think I meant.... Ohhhhhhh

[beyondthefringe]

By god, it all sounds so plausible. :)

Further thoughts:

I wonder what the cost of these things is. You'll notice that for all the times we've seen his costume wrecked and his shooters run out of fluid at convenient times, the web-shooters rarely take catastrophic damage. They can't be easy or cheap to fix or replace, and how many spare sets can we plausibly have stored away?

Made easier in recent times when he had access to Avengers resources, Stark labs, Horizon facilities, and a regular paycheck, but during the majority of his career, these had to represent a huge investment as part of his heroic identity. I mean, he sometimes had trouble raising the money to buy the ingredients to make the web fluid! Imagine these getting damaged beyond repair and him having to go without for weeks. :)

[halloweenjack]

This was a version of the 60s in which nuclear energy experiments were being done in open environments populated both by spiders and by field trips from high school. (Also: you want to drive your truck full of badly-secured nuclear waste through Hell's Kitchen? No prob!)

[dr_archeville]

High school shop classes in the 1960s had much more high-end stuff than I'd imagined!

(A friend once said the most unbelievable part of Spider-Man wasn't that he could come up with the designs for the web-shooters or the webbing, but that Parker could actually build them given what he would've had to work with.)

[violetclm.livejournal.com]

"The wristlets have sharp steel nipples"
o_O

[beyondthefringe]

Steel Nipples is the name of my new heavy metal band. o.0