>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.

Like I said, it has potential. I never said the thing was entirely perfect - though, that said, the thing's 800 metres of highly unstable antimatter and that's a pretty big reason to make it perfect. And that, I reckon, is what the R&D teams of whichever company is mad enough to buy the plans would have to work on. Perhaps not so much a railgun as a rail-acceleration system that fires heavily-shielded buckyballs containing the antimatter in a similar manner to the bottle effect on plasma-based weaponry...

Also, any crew who messed up the loading procedure wouldn't be reduced to free-floating subatomic particles. Assuming that their error caused an antimatter leak of some kind, the ship, crew and much of any surrounding fleet would be transmuted to energy - that's what antimatter does, with total efficiency, hence the dangers involved with its use. However, since some scientists believe matter is merely condensed energy anyway, the point is moot. The effect would still be similar, I just pick nits like a crack-fuelled bonobo.