The Roland has the extended hammerheads due to the missile launchers and magazines. One of the requirements before making this model was that the missile launcher tubes had to somewhat close together, because it's stated in the books that theoretically, a single hit at either end could take out all the offensive weaponry. The next "must have" is a magazine system that can take missiles from a damaged tube's magazine and move them to another, undamaged tube. Also, being that the Roland is the smallest class able to carry and launch Mk-16 DDMs - and that it carries 120 of them per hammerhead - there's not much room for conventional magazines (Mk-16s are about 50-60% larger than Mk-13s, the previous DD, CL, and CA -class missiles). Therefore, the magazines are circular, with two 60-round "rails" per hammerhead, one behind the other. Transfer equipment moves a missile from the aft ring to the forward ring as space becomes available. The rings and the launch tubes are what account for most of the additional length of the hammerheads.Regarding your comment about how the ships all look the same... that's deliberate. The physics David uses for the Honorverse dictate the way the (war)ships look. As I've mentioned many times before on other forums and in other discussions, this is really no different from real-world warships, or just about anything else actually. Once a certain design (of whatever) is found to work and work well, it get copied by everybody. The differences are in the details, or what's "under the hood". As an example, several years ago, a photo appeared that was captioned as an American Naval force on maneuvers. The problem was that it was actually a Russian task group. The mistake was spotted by someone who knew the differences in radar panel design/location between the U.S. and Russia. It's the same with cars. tanks, aircraft, and so on. To anyone unfamiliar with the details, they all basically look the same. Once I start doing the PRH ships, the mentions of how they look like RMN ships are going to skyrocket, because they WILL be similar in general layout and proportions of major features.The "solar panels" are actually radiators. However, they are not the primary means of shedding heat. That honor (no pun intended) goes to the Rolly Things™ behind the superstructure (no, that's not the bridge - both main bridge and auxiliary bridges are buried deep inside hull). The Rolly Things™ dump waste heat into the wedge through the process of icantexplainium. The radiators are there mostly as backup, and for times when the wedge is down (the wedge is required to be up for the waste heat to get dumped into it), and the reactors and other systems are at low power levels.Plus, we needed to fill all that empty real estate on the dorsal and ventral surfaces with SOMETHINGWhile we at BuNine work directly with David to get the ship designs as close as possible to what he envisions, we still have some leeway in adding our own frills here and there.