"Technical fibers/textiles, imo, are out of reach for KBLB."
I agree.
You can't expect to make "technical" fibers from a natural process.
The whole point of "technical" fibers... is gaining the element of engineering precision sufficient to AVOID the variation that is unavoidable when you use natural production methods.
No matter what you do, you will NEVER get chickens to make eggs that are identical. Chickens will NEVER make eggs that are as uniformly made as those you can mass produce by molding them out of plastic. If the objective is to eat the eggs and enjoy them... the minor variation in the chicken produce won't matter, eggs are easily sorted by size at a level that's "good enough" to differentiate grades for the market, and I'd still go with the chickens. If the objective is use uniform physical properties in materials, to engineer the uniformity of the material into a uniformity of performance in something you want to make from the material... I'd go with the eggs from the manufacturing process.
When there is variation... and a lot of it... there's a lot of work to do in sorting, testing, and baselining... so that you can determine minimum performance standards. Those things are all incorporated already into risking the variables in the manufacturing process of an engineered fiber. You still have to test the fibers, but, you know what an engineered fiber will give you if properly made, and you don't have the same RANDOM risk in "natural" variation that you don't control.
Worm butts will never give you that... any more than chicken butts will be able to.
If you're going to build me a bullet proof vest out of kevlar... I'm fairly confident in the engineering of the material and its testing... so I know how its likely to perform... and can trust it will perform to spec.
If you're going to build me a bullet proof vest out of silk... I'm not going to have a similar degree of confidence in the quality and testing being done by the lowest bidder willing to provide the fiber... while random variation can easily enough make the vest I get be the one that falls outside the average.
A bit of variation in the silk fiber in my shirt... just proves its "natural" and it becomes a marketing benefit.
The same variation in the silk in that bullet proof vest... and it will fail and the user will die... if, say, there was a cold, cloudy day during the period the silk was being made, when the worms didn't get fed properly... and all the fibers made in that period have a weak "kink"...
The same variation that is acceptable and even undetectable in a shirt... will cause an America's Cup yachts' laminates to fail... and having a similar delamination and engineering failure occur in the fuselage of the 787 you're flying in... means that what's plenty good enough in garment quality material, just isn't good enough in engineering terms.
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AI
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