The Mk-31 robot, also known as the Spiderbot, was originally designed for use by police and special forces as a non-lethal option when dealing with entrenched suspects who had taken hostages.

The small robots were armed with sprayers that shot an artificial webbing, stored in liquid form in contains on the robot's back. The liquid dried quickly, forming into thousands of sticky strands with a strength equal to that of steel. The robots would work in groups, circling a suspect spraying his legs and gradually moving upwards until he was entirely wrapped. A single robot could carry enough webbing fluid at a time to secure ten people.

Despite success with intial testing, the Mk-31A was withdrawn from service quickly, when it was found the small, quick moving robots, designed to be hard to hit, often caused the suspects to fire wildly in an attempt to destroy the robots, in the process often hitting each other or hostages accidentally.

Soon after, however, the Mk-31B and C models went up for general sale where they quickly found favor among bounty-hunters and slavers. The 'B' model was equipped with a DNA scanner into which allowed them to target a specific individual for capture with a larger power supply, increasing each individual units speed and range.

The 'C' model on the other hand, popular with slavers, was given a less discriminate targeting system, allowing the user to specify targets by a variety of criteria (i.e. female, between the ages of 16 and 30) and then released into a public area (such as a hotel). Once the Mk-31C's had secured all targets within the specified paramiters, the slavers could enter and simply pick up the helplessly wrapped bundles and load them onto a nearby aircar for transport to a training facility.

Though no longer produced, all three modals of the Mk-31 are available to anyone with a bounty-hunting license or a Class-3 Industrial Slavers license...