>Perhaps is it a little mean to dismiss out of hand every last aspect
>of the Poodle class, or whatever it was. The ship itself is
>laughable. For sure, it is completely out of character for the Tin
>Frisbee Brigade. For sure, it laughs in the face of the UF equivalent
>of OSHA regulations.
>
>The actual gun the thing's carrying is a class act. It's got
>potential. And that would be of considerable interest to the various
>capital ship designing wallahs in Known Space. So what if at the
>moment it's mounted in the starship equivalent of a damp cigar? It
>doesn't have to be. And perhaps that'll be something to be looked at
>by those nice chaps from ZCII or Utopia Planitia?

The actual gun is why I declared the design more of a danger to the crew than to the enemy. Not only are you carrying more antimatter onboard than most tankers, but the weapon itself requires a very precise, error-free series of steps to be followed in order to fire a single volley. If there's an error during any of those steps, at best you've rendered the main gun inert, at worst you and the other ships in your fleet are less than a minute away from becoming a free-floating cloud of subatomic particles.

Antimatter is and has generally always been best used in (relatively) small amounts, such as for fueling M/AM reactors or photon torpedoes. When antimatter starts accounting for more than 1/4 of a ship's design weight, you're not just asking for trouble, you're basically reserving a plot in the afterlife.