I'm not certain. The ship was based on a model built by David Jones who was heavily involved in the making of many of the Buck ships (he did the pre-prod sketch of the Thunderfighter based on McQuarrie's early Viper sketches, surely you know the model Chris and I have created based on that design). David started work on it for another production called "ShowScan". The model remained unfinished and was brought to Vance Frederick who should "do something" with it because they quickly needed another ship for a new episode. It is possible that the design was influenced by the time it was created (it was "Empire" time), and many of the people involved in the effects worked on "Star Wars" and several Douglas Trumbull productions ("Close Encounters", "2001"). The model was rebuilt into the Astrosled for the episode "Olympiad" later (and apparently restored to its original configuration as it can be seen in the battlebuck gallery).
Well, MAYBE they thought, hey, "Empire" has Boba, why can't we have anything like that? Or maybe visor slits were "in" at that time (remember the Aurora?
).