"A squat, metallic spider, with huge articulated claws - but it, too, had a hood in which a martian sat. I watched it pursuing some people across a field. It caught them nimbly and tossed them into a great metal basket upon its back."
The second machine constucted by the martians to terrorise Victorian england in Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds. That record scarred my psyche as a young child - very scary when you're five!
I saw the design sketch by Michael Trim in the inlay booklet of the CD, and I thought it would make a good character reference.
