Didn't we send a ship to it to search for any weaknesses a little bit earlier?
A disabled royal cruiser HAS been captured before and studied.
Well, the "bristles" seem to be made of some sort of crystalline structure, they seem to be fuel rods. When observed closely, several bristles "sink" or are absorbed when the ship fires. Our head military engineers are working on a device that when fired, it latches onto a bristle and vibrates incredibly rapid, matching the bristles resonance frequency, and thus shattering the bristle and any bristles touching that one. Since the bristles are so close together, this could be quite effective. It is rumored that the Apex could be carrying some prototypes of these.
The main hull seems to be an organic material that can rapidly harden or regenerate. The bottom, darker part seems to not be too different, although we couldn't penetrate it using the scientific tools used to see what was really inside it all, and to make it worse the captured ship woke up, shot at everything around it, and jumped away into hyperspace.