a) First quick point - Why are there AP values on spinal mounts. Really guys? Truly? I think we can remove the AP values from railgun/particle weapons wholesale - completely superfluous! Even if we were playing in the TL of the Singularity TL26, that minimum 6DD weapon is going to laugh at the armour. So honestly.. please.. lol, I feel like someone did this as tongue-in-cheek actually 
b) This isn't really ship design but is a critical combat issue with spinal mounts.
I notice spinal mounts have the -DM to hit for smaller ships and small craft. Great.
In MGT1, the saving grace to surviving the spinal attack was that the attack, inherently, was a -6 to hit BASE. To be correct, hitting with a Spinal mount was a formidable (14+ action).
I just wanted to highlight that so it's not missed, because we would not want spinal-mount combat to be trivial. (It required you usually to have a good crew, dump all your firecontrol, etc etc to get a hit. Which would ofcourse usually annihilate whatever you hit... )
b) This isn't really ship design but is a critical combat issue with spinal mounts.
I notice spinal mounts have the -DM to hit for smaller ships and small craft. Great.
In MGT1, the saving grace to surviving the spinal attack was that the attack, inherently, was a -6 to hit BASE. To be correct, hitting with a Spinal mount was a formidable (14+ action).
I just wanted to highlight that so it's not missed, because we would not want spinal-mount combat to be trivial. (It required you usually to have a good crew, dump all your firecontrol, etc etc to get a hit. Which would ofcourse usually annihilate whatever you hit... )