The thing that I find funny about the "vs environment" business is this:
Think about the most badass organisms ever to exist on earth outside of humans. I'm thinking dinosaurs. So take the most dangerous land-dwelling dinosaur, T-Rex. How would T-Rex fair against a squad of modern soldiers? Not well. He might take a few soldiers out, but the grenades would do him in. He wouldn't even stand a chance against an Abrams tank or a jet fighter.
So whatever we are going to be facing on Planet X can not only stand a fair chance of beating modern weapons, but future weapons as well. Yet, somehow these creatures come from a planet close enough to ours that we could live there. It seems surprising that a planet with similar gravity and chemistry could produce something significantly more terrifying than a T-Rex.
1v1 trex probably will always win against a modern soldier but that depends on the soldiers equipment..
And well, closest thing we have to siege worms is our whales in the oceans. Our blue whale is huge but that's basically it. But blue whales is like 60-90 feet about roughly the length of four m1a1s parked from front to back.
And has size measurements of the siege worm been released? For it to be able to tear cities apart, its probably 10x times bigger than a blue whale at minimum?
And it seems liek we recently discovered the world's biggest dinosaur at this date very recently..
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-sid...osaur--discovered-in-argentina-203028038.html
Paleontologists in Argentina say they recently discovered fossils belonging to the largest dinosaur on record. During its lifetime, the new species of titanosaur is believed to have stood 65-feet-tall, was more than 130-feet-long, and weighed 77 tons (155,000 pounds).
Which makes its length roughly the size of five m1a1s. But at same time it weights 77 tons supposedly. And a single m1a1 weights 60ish tons.
From what I'm seeing, it seems like animals can growth to surprising sizes while not weighting that much compared to our hardware due to bone and flesh weighting more lighter than metal.
Which means if we was to suddenly find ourselves under siege by dinosaurs of Earth, even rudimentary huge cannonballs fired from err renaissance era cannons of right size will be enough to crush their bones and end it's rampage. If we have one that's big enough that is if not well can build one xD
So basically this means the siege worm is pretty tough, astoundingly tough by our biological standards. If it can push battle tanks around like they're toys then their weight might be at minimum of 100 tons.
While compared to T-rex, the t-rex isn't that huge though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#mediaviewer/File:Largesttheropods.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus#mediaviewer/File:Longest_dinosaurs1.png
Meat eaters tend to be smaller while plant eaters tend to be bigger.
But this suggests that the best way to bring an siege worm down pretty fast is to have something with great piercing power then have the penetrated shell explode inside the siege worm to cause big damage to it's organs.
And plus, it sorta similar to centipede due to it's segmented body or did i get centipedes wrong? There gotta be weak points in it's armor. The Linked segments?
To bring one down would make a huge improvement in how we make our body armor from studying it's corpse.
However, there is one advantage that Siege worm do have over us.. It apparently can move underground.. fast. And it can basically attack us with impunity by not exposing itself from afar but instead wait until it's just beneath our feet and then create an movable sarlacc pit. Nom nom.
But that means it hunts by tracking vibrations and sounds. Our battle tanks is pretty vulnerable from being attacked underneath.
Good countermeasure would be to attach an vibrator to a bomb and let the siege worm kill itself by nomming on bombs making vibrations.
hmmm
