Ark Royal actually is meant to look like that. She's a Galleon-class CVA, a design from a past Captains' Log (I think) which combines four hellbores with thirty Stingers.
I have been assured on the highest authority that any resemblance between the fighter and launch tube equipped, (at times) exiled-from-their-homeworld, rapid-firing short-ranged-weapons-using Hydrans, added to the game in 1981, and the original BSG tv series of 1979-80 is... entirely co-incidental.
So there you have it.
(TBH I suspect the only person who could definitively answer that is their original creator, Andrew Robinson, and I don't know if he is available to be enquired of).

