Questions of abrasion and water reactivity ...
Raovac, you are wondering if there are reasons why DS and MS might not be suited for textiles and sporting goods. There are a couple of important things we do not know about DS and MS. Specifically, how resistant to abrasion are these fibers, and how they react with water.
Mundane silk is often 'dry-clean only.' Silk will absorb a lot of water, but then becomes much, much weaker. So weak that a trip through a washing machine becomes a death sentence. I'm not sure we would want a great T-shirt that had to be taken to the dry cleaners.
The second issue is a subtle one: abrasion resistance. Silks suffer a lot of damage when something rubs on the fibers. You wouldn't want a pair of DS tennis shoes that wouldn't last a long run because the fibers stretched and pulled over one another and then broke.
There are clearly applications where this would not be important. Imagine a Japanese Kimono made from spider silk. Not a huge market, but anyone who could afford this luxury wouldn't worry about dry-cleaning costs or hard wear-and-tear. Luxury silk shirts and dresses likewise. High-end apparel won't worry about these issues.
Please understand that I am NOT saying these are problems with DS and MS, only that we don't know how these fibers will perform. Manufacturers are concerned with other factors as well. How the fibers react with dyes. (Do the dyes uptake like normal silk? Do the dyes weaken the fabric?) I'm pretty sure that manufacturers will want samples to test for properties that they care about which your or I might not think of.
Bolt Threads seems to think they can design in characteristics that will make their fabrics more attractive to clothing manufacturers. Presumably KBLB will be able to do the same things, and more. But it takes time to design, genetically-modify, breed for homozygosticity, and produce commercial quantities of said silks.
Personally, I'd like from KBLB "A little less talk and a lot more action."
