Large three-legged war machines with glowing red eyes fire lasers and emit black smoke across a desolate landscape under a cloudy sky.

The fighting machines walk on three tall, articulated legs and have a grouping of long, whip-like metallic tentacles hanging beneath the central body, a single flexible appendage holding the heat-ray projector. Atop the main body a hood-like head houses a sole Martian operator. The fighting machines are armed with a heat-ray, which is fired by a camera-like device held by an articulated arm, and a chemical weapon known as "the black smoke", a poisonous gas which is deployed from gun tubes. The fighting machines can also discharge steam through nozzles that dissipates the black smoke, which then settles as an inert, powdery substance. The metallic tentacles, which hang below the main fighting machine body, are used as probes and for grasping objects. The height of the fighting machines is unclear; in the novel, a newspaper article describes them to be more than 100 feet (30 m) tall See more