- a volume closed off from the water outside it creates bouyancy, if there is water in it or not. (following Archimedes' law)
- whatever the bow design, removing volume requires balancing. if you remove the volume but keep the (relative) weight, the bow will dive in deeper, and even without waves the ship will be trimmed forward. and that reduces speed (or increases the required power) increases draft, and changes the way the ship moves. that is the seakeeping refered to above.
also....... "reduce bow buoyancy... that's how you get bows to pierce waves instead of ride them" is not entirely true, reducing bow bouyancy actually stops waves from pushing the ship out of the wave and reducing the bow wave, but it is not the only factor to getting a wave piercing bow.
That's blatantly untrue...
An object made from a material heavier than water -- steel, aluminum, fiberglass, etc. -- which is filled (entirely with water) is not buoyant. It sinks. An object filled with water is buoyant if and only if the material itself is lighter than water
The sonar pod itself was added after the original geometry of the hull was designed. If the sonar pod is heavier than water it is like hanging a rock from the bow. If it is lighter, it is like hanging a balloon. In most such installations the pod will be designed such that it's total weight for the enclosed volume is about the same as the water it displaces so it doesn't actually require ballasting in the stern for balance. The construction materials and the sonar equipment will be heavier. But, you can easily build in an appropriate air space or two to balance them out. It won't be very precisely neutral, but a little bit of extra weight or lift (say +- 100kg) in the bow doesn't amount to much on a vessel of this size. It'll be like a sailor standing on deck. neat the bow. You wouldn't ballast for that; it wouldn't affect trim tangibly enough to matter.
Wave piercing is not that esoteric. It's actually very simple. At hull speed... roughly 1.34 x sqrt(length_in_ft)... the wave length of the wave made by the ship is roughly the length of the ship. When they happens the ship sits in the middle of a valley with the peaks of the wake it makes near the bow and the stern. To go faster it needs to climb the bow wave, which means engine power has to fight not just hydrodynamic resistance but gravity. Lifting a 5000 ton ship is a lot of work so a lot of power is needed to go a little bit faster. But this is assuming that you are actually climbing the bow wave...
In a ship whose bow is very slender, the magnitude of the bow wave is minimized. This make it easier to climb -- reduces the gradient if you will. In a ship whose bow is very slender compared to the waist amidships and the which has a flat transom stern. The buoyancy is concentrated in the middle and near the nose the ship isn't very buoyant. The bow hence tends to cut deeper into the bow wave as it sinks into it while the ship's middle and stern resists sinking lower. In a tumblehome hull, this is aided further by the fact that you have less and less additional enclosed volume the deeper you sink into the water. We don't have that here, but we do have a very, very, narrow bow with very little flare.
A design like this goes faster and needs less engine power to maintain a good cruise speed. They do get wetter in front in heavy seas compared to ships with a hurricane bow. This is in part mitigated by the fact that the freeboard is about 7~8 m above the waterline depending on the loading, and the gun, VLS cells and all that is very far from the bow. Compared to the Zumwalt, because the bow actually is slightly flared and not a tumble home and the sides are traditionally flared, the ship is less prone to rolling over in heavy seas with waves come from the sides or the rear quarter.
oke, if you design it to be weighing exactly the same as the volume, it does not change the trim. however, it does change the overall CoG, center of bouyancy, wet surface, forward surface, moments of intertia, the spread of volume over the hull and the full hull volume. and thus the way forces on the ship work, the stability, the way the ship moves, the power the engines require, the point the hull turns around, the impacts of waves on the ship........
let me put an example to explain all that simple: if you have an empty bucket floating in the water, or you fill that bucket up with water. if you fill it up, it moves differently, right? and that is all you do here, you add weight and volume to an already existing hull (or remove it) and to check if all still works you have to recalculate everything.
the fact that you add the sonar bulb late in the hull design process is a bad thing as well, btw, as then again you can recalculate the entire forward hull for pressures, weights, etc, something you could have avoided by incorporating it earlier. of course this does not go for your drawing, but it goes that way for real ships, where everything has to be correct.