ORIGINAL: warbirdav8r
I can tell you that Corvin Miller took a Ziroli design to TOP GUN . He told me that he moved the canopy a little and made his own cowl is all. He must have felt it was close enough. He won TOP GUN once and obviously knew what he was doing.Hope this helps.
Yes he did, and perhaps some in this thread would like to speculate on how, and why the final design took the shape it did, but I can tell you from first hand experience that when you're designing a model, particularly a scale model you expect to market to the 'masses', then there's a few tradeoffs that need to be reconciled.
The airplane was the best that was offered at the time, and although there are a couple of guys here in this forum that are critical of the scale outline, none have designed a similarly sized model that could be produced in the numbers that the Ziroli has, and none have designed any models at all.
Much ado has been made of the location of the cockpit and the lack of slope on the fuselage nose, but these are simple modifications to the basic plan if one is 'bent' on producing a scale like replication of a Corsair.
For the rest of us, you know, those of us that look at this airplane, fly it, and have built a few of them, it's more than close enough to scale.
Having said that, and given that you said you're interested in the Ziroli, then IMO this is the best choice for you.
There are always guys that'll argue endlessly over minutia.
Does it matter to the "ordinary schmuck"...? I don't think so! You'll still "wow" the guys at the field with a fully decked out Z Corsair........