https://www.miragrant.com/series/newsflesh/ - because proper zombies, and a fascinating look at a society that has adapted to them.
Eldrae, I suspect, would solve this with more dakka.
I haven’t read those myself, but preventing zombie apocalypses is among the many things that this is for.
…I would have expected the Imperial Navy to have an equivalent class, but properly armed, for those plagues which require point defense.
I take it the design requirements for fitting a Leukocyte’s capacities into a dreadnought-sized warship hull are either directly conflicting or too expensive to be justified?
There is currently no requirement for dealing with bioplagues that can reach orbit from planetside independently, mostly because there aren’t any bioplagues that can reach orbit from planetside independently. (And if we’re thinking about terrified people on starships with zombies, well, there are plenty of actual warships for that without making a half-classed variant.)
Also, bear in mind that the massive outbreaks seen in most zombie apocalypses (this one, World War Z, etc.) tend to happen because the authorities are hilariously, spectacularly incompetent at quarantine and containment, and are usually attempting cover-ups and various other let’s-see-how-worse-we-can-make-things tactics.
The Imperial Ministry of Public Health doesn’t suffer from that particular foible, and if some plague of that level of severity is about to break quarantine, Locus Zero will be excised, sterilized, and cauterized to ensure that that doesn’t happen. They have plenty of people trained in making cold-numbers decisions for situations exactly like that one.
Yeah, in a competence-heavy environment the outbreak - such as it is - is more likely to happen like described here.
So, if there was to be an outbreak of something like The Beast, the response would be to send many warships with antimatter warheads and to keep firing until no one atom is connected to any other atoms.
Only after doing science to it. (Or the bits that aren’t in the containment where the science is being done, of course.)