Good points. One thing about this ship is that it's not a heavily armed ship of the line that's designed to last very long in combat; it's a retrofit civilian ship used for intelligence gathering and the like. Doesn't mean they don't find themselves in a fight occasionally and have to deal with their limitations, but that's (part of) a story in itself...
Venardhi has modeled and animated a variation on the design, and gave me permission to post links to it. Pretty cool:
http://www.venardhi.com/sketches/shiprotate.mov
http://www.venardhi.com/sketches/shipzoom.mov