The Hitchhiker's Guide Project

Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax

An insanely aggressive race of people who lived around twenty billion years ago, when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea worth fighting for was a new one. And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did it a lot.

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was just to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way of life, one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of energy. The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend of Striterax was to put him in a room on his own, because sooner or later he would simply beat himself up.

A major achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax is that they were the first race who ever managed to shock a computer. It was a gigantic spaceborne computer called Hactar, which to this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. (See the entry on Hactar for a more detailed description.)

They eventually went on to find an entirely new way of blowing themselves up, which was a profound relief to everyone else in the Galaxy.