cthia wrote:Somtaaw wrote:
Aerosal vector's would be a nightmare to design, and based on the description that the assassin nanites have to be tailored using a sample of the target specifically. That would indicate that either you're using an aerosal vector blanketing hundreds of people to actually 'infect' a single target, or you're having to obtain samples of hundreds of people, whipping up the nanites and releasing hundreds of slightly different nanite variants for each person, which may actually become visible at initial release.
Now somewhere like Grayson would be far easier to achieve proper aerosal infection, given each and every home is, for all intents a self-contained orbital station. So you could infect the entirety of Grayson, one home at a time, and nobody would notice until suddenly the nanites activated.
Circling back around, an aerosal vector of the suicide protocals may not need to be specifically tailored to its target, but you'd also get the statistical clumping that the MAlign avoided when they were leaving Mesa. Unless you managed to write some form of program so the nanites inside a person essentially use a lottery to determine how they'll kill a person. However you'd still get some form of statistical clumping not to mention unusual causes of death where someone that has no history of X condition [say heart disease] suddenly drops dead from a heart attack, when they'd just had a physical and pronounced perfectly healthy.
Indeed, aerosol vectors would be a nightmare to design. As dramatized on "The Last Ship" tv series. And discussed amongst the MDs in my group.
Obtaining a DNA sample of an intended target is easy peasy. (Law enforcement and the like just kindly offer you the hospitality of a soft drink. Then send the expended can to the lab.)
Obtaining the sample, working with the sample, then getting access to the target again, as would have had to occur with Lt. Meares, a military target, raises questions. Especially if the DNA sample has to be streaked all the way back to Darius.
This discussion also comes full circle to whether a select target group can be targeted en masse if their DNA is similar. Like the entire Winton line.
I also suspect that ventilation systems could be utilized to achieve the same goals. Or tainted water supplies.
Which would move it closer to the perfect crime. Since tracing the vector of infection would be thwarted by the fact that most of everyone who drank from the "source" are not affected.
I remain a little unconvinced that biological weapons can be targetted only on a particular genome line, such as the Wintons, or the Harringtons, just from their genome.
It may become slightly more possible because if there were certain, trace elements or similar that are unique to certain planets, it may be easier to genengineer some form of bioweapon that could target individuals from that planet.They'd be carriers of those local bugs and resistances, which is different enough from regular humans to specifically target.
So offhand, a handful of Andermani systems, Manticorans because of their After-Landing plague, Sphinx; and that's about it for planets we have hard data on having had local bugs that mutated and killed lots of humans.
Targetting genomes directly I think is a doomed failure, humanity isn't that genetically diverse that you could target specific subsets without actually killing everybody, or just giving everybody the sniffles but nothing serious.
