No but several billion little robots made of dna mechanically disassembling things at the molecular level could potentially do some damage rather quickly. Also, we're kind of basing our explanations on the concept of incubation period here, assuming that the organisms inside the viral round need to replicate until they overwhelm the threshold and become symptomatic. What if, instead of getting a small number of organisms that need to replicate round the body, a viral round is more like a syringe containing an absolute overkill of organisms needed to become symptomatic.* *I consider myself an ignorant swine at best when it comes to speaking scientifically of biology, so forgive me if my suggestions are just plain wrong
I am sure Ariadna are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons to fire their Haqq super-bullets.
Fun fact; Loup Garou viral rifles are in fact Haqqislam Viral Rifles. Same guns. I think that the guns and ammo need to be used together and Haqq trades them as a single item with Merovingia in return from presumably Teseum? Other vital natural resources?
Lots and lots of Teseum. Viral Ammunition is an armament project developed in laboratories by biologists and immunologists commissioned by the Haqqislamite Army. Designed specifically as deadly light ammunition, it's the answer for "One shot, one kill" philosophies. The use of it as anti-riot ammunition against Dogfaces is of interest specifically to Ariadna, which acquired a shipment in exchange for a significant amount of Teseum.
Like @leigen_zero says, it's not replicating via DNA, it's a machine that rips cells apart and uses the DNA in the cells as the raw materials to make more robots. Which then make more robots, etc. Exponential growth curve to turn you into a puddle of gray goo. The trick is figuring out how to stop the reproduction process 100% reliably. Exactly. It's your classic 'Gray Goo' nanoweapon, but using DNA as the building blocks instead of smaller carbon molecules. It'd be easier to have Haqq load the bullets into Ariadnan ammo, but the Ariadnan Viral Rifle models are physically the same as the Haqq ones. So it looks more like Ariadna bought viral rifles and ammo from Haqq.
That's very similar to what a virus does. And polymerizing DNA takes time at the temperatures that a human body exists at.
Remember that proteins are huge molecules. Naturally they allow for numerous chemical connections to form or break up almost at the same time. It's pretty efficient and fast for what it is. But we know what those speeds are in practice.
A virus needs to hijack the machinery in a cell that allows a cell to replicate in order to make more viruses. This machinery unzips the DNA helix and then takes the G-A-T-C bases to match up to the half of the helix it's 'reading', which then needs to be unzipped and matched with more loose base pairs before it gets re-zipped into a duplicated DNA sequence. What I'm talking about is bypassing that machinery and using the nanobot's DNA molecules to break a cell's DNA into component base pairs then make more nanobots from the rubble. Even if we were using the same biological processes, we can double the replication rate by matching both sides of the unzipped DNA at the same time. And we're not using the same mechanisms to replicate the DNA. (I am aware that these methods have not been demonstrated in the lab. I'd want to nuke any lab working on this type of nano from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. While everyone involved in the project was in the lab.) A related concept would be a prion, which is a 'mis-folded' protein that causes other proteins of the same type to misfold into the same shape as the prion, instead of folding into the shape that they're supposed to be. Even worse, each of these new mis-folded proteins is just as 'infectious' as the prion that caused them to misfold. A very small amount of prions can cause massive problems. Mad Cow disease is one example of a prion disease, and so is kuru.
Tarik flexes his muscles under top laboratory conditions, and produces pure Haqqislamite hero-juice, like a lemon. This is loaded into bullets, and fired at people. Once inside, the hero-juice attacks all the cells it encounters at lightning MOV 6-4 speed and causes them to take two ARM and one BTS save, which no cell can withstand apart from those in Bolts, because they're Australian or something.
Yes, yes, I'm a molecular biologist, I know what we're talking about. There's a limit to how fast DNA can be polymerized (at the temperature of the human body). We're talking on the order of several minutes here. And if you can change the temperature of the target, it'd be easier to kill them that way. These are all interesting and deadly, but the time scale that they kill on is orders of magnitude slower than what would be required on the battlefield. Viral infections just can't kill that fast.
OK, sweet, but I don't think we're talking about the same things here. When you say "polymerize DNA", are you referring to the unzip/rezip step, or the assembly of base pairs to their mates? Or both steps together? Because the mechanism I'm imagining would allow for bypassing the unzip/rezip step, and possibly the matching part. Depending on how exactly the chopping mechanism worked, it could be using G-C or A-T pairs as the fundamental building block to reassemble (this would depend on whether it's easier to unzip the two strands or chop the two strands into ladders, which isn't something I know). What happens when you start with a gram of your viral payload, instead of a microgram? That's a million times more 'bad stuff' to do the work. Let's see here: So nano is explicitly a cloud attack, while viral is a projectile or blade. Viral more easily breaches your BTS (counting your skin as one part of your biotech shield) because it's on a larger projectile or blade and doesn't have to rely on the nanites to eat through your skin.
Wouldn't a million times as many viral components run into logistics problems? More assured death, but not necessarily a million times faster because it'd take on average longer for each virus to come into contact with a cell. Helped of course if the projectile fragments, but the you run into the question of "wouldn't ARM be a better save attribute since you're pretty much fucked if this penetrates but a decently hard material will make the projectile shatter harmlessly on the outside?" (Or put differently "isn't this more like Shock than biotech?")
The assembly of base pairs is what I'm talking about. The two halves of a DNA helix are joined together with hydrogen bonds; that's relatively easy to open and close. But actually adding new bases to the end of a strand requires the formation of new covalent bonds (and the breaking of old ones), which is much more energetically intensive and most notably takes time. Due to the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, this wouldn't actually be more efficient. It still takes time for a viral particle to enter a cell and kill it. Past a certain point, adding more payload wouldn't increase the speed of action, only the lethality.
Well, it would potentially allow for each virus/nanomachine to attack a different cell. Have you ever had the joys of injected contrast for a CT scan? Takes a few tens of seconds before you feel it everywhere, but you can feel it spread. Back of your tongue goes warm, then your heart, then farther down. As far as "more like shock than biotech," well, blame CB for explicitly limiting Nanotech to being cloud/spray attacks only. Damn. Back to the mental drawing board. Or not, this is grim space to be working in. Thanks for the clarification! I admit, a full gram of viral/nanobot particles (a million times the lethal payload) is probably gross overkill, but hitting someone with a thousand times the payload (a milligram instead of a microgram) would probably get the job done. Oooh, evil, evil thought: Some variation of botulinum toxin that is assembled by nanobots instead of bacteria, and that needs to steal something from a human body as starting materials (as a limitation to prevent poisoning the entire area). BOTOX is quite possibly the most biologically active stuff in the world. A dose strong enough to kill 50% of the people exposed to it (the LD50) is 2 nanograms per kg of human. Yes, nanograms. Billionths of a gram. Given my background, I'd probably take more than that, but 400 billionths of a gram (0.4 micrograms) should be enough to put me down permanently. Doesn't take long to make that little material, we're actually talking about a countable number of molecules (400 nanograms would be about 120 billion molecules of botox)! But talk about one of the worst ways to go. Botox works by preventing muscles from contracting. A lethal dose prevents you from breathing. *shudder*
Never had the pleasure of a CT scan, no. Botulinum is "fun". Make sure your pickled raw onions are of highest quality craftmanship. Still, this is a toxin and not a virus. Toxins are plausible agents in Viral ammo, exceot the ammo isn't quite described that way. Also, a nanomachine assembling botox sounds like a good way to cause significant collateral damage.
