Rupert Boleyn wrote:

 > The problem being that in the quantities needed to have a
 > rapid effect the victim's body would almost certainly notice
 > the viral shells and react strongly.
 > Anaphylactic shock is probably not what one was looking for.

Not for a less than lethal agent, no.

One could posit low-antigenicity surfaces of some kind to avoid
initiating extreme unwanted preprogrammed responses. Drexler's papers
and books suggest organic molecule-based first gen machines to prove the
concept before the diamondoid universal magicbots ;-)

I think a potential sequence of events would look like this:

- inoculation with 'mappers' that act as signposts with surface features
and emitted chemical signals.
- inoculation or construction of target seeking devices that go on to
exert desired effect in target tissues.

So you are left with an infection-like incubation period and active phase.

Going back to the neuromuscular junction example, there are some 10^8
targets.

If a victim gets dosed with 10^6 devices, say, then they need to
reproduce to get to at least the 10^8 required. (How the devices know
how many copies they need to make is another problem that needs to be
solved).

100x increase in numbers is ~6.6 doublings. If we use one of the fastest
dividing bacterium like C. perfringens as an example, generation time is
10 minutes. Incubation time is 66 minutes.

Rob O'Connor