spaceship spinal guns are just the sci-fi version of insisting the A-10 is actually good and the design compromises on every other aspect of it is worth having a big gun
"Yeah, we're going to make the main structure that runs the whole length of the ship hollow, and exert huge forces on it, don't worry about it."
"Yeah sure, you have to point the entire ship at the target, and that both severely limits our ability to perform manoeuvres and makes our field of fire easy to evade, but we only really need one hit so it'll work out."
I do like the justifications sci-fi universes come up with to justify that particular piece of rule-of-cool, though.
E.g, MACs make sense as the only thing that can dump enough energy into a Covenant ship to disable its shields without being slow enough to be hit by their superior point defense. No point in launching hundreds of Archer missiles if the four or five that make it through don’t have enough oomf to cripple the ship after managing to overload the shields.
probably a bit overkill for the Insurrection, though
Halo's lore is hilarious at parts because they're trying to fight a defensive war against an alien invasion with the 50 kinds of war crimes machine they'd made for bombing dissidents.
