ORIGINAL: rcpattern
Doug,
Sean McMurtry told me last year that is the EXACT reason he was flying the newer schemes with the curves. He is flying one of Narukes plane's also, so he didn't have much choice, but he told me that the Japenese and European's have been doing this for years simply because it can add questions to the judges heads. If you don't have straight lines on the plane, it is much harder to have reference points in which to see the true attitude of the plane, so that small errors are hidden. I would hope that for all judges this would make zero difference, but at the same time, I'm smart enough to know that there is probably a judge out there that looks at things like that. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but that was the theory I was told last year
Arch
Arch,
I have a great deal of respect for Sean's flying BUT...don't think I buy in for most flight situations. Most of the light conditions we fly in tend to mute the color schemes, and the more elaborate the greater the muting effect. Stated another way, we generally tend to fly a silhouette in most light conditions and at distance. Model attitude has quite a bit to say about that of course, (knife edge for axample is one attitude that shows up a scheme better than most others), but models tend to spend little time in highly visible attitudes.
On some fleeting occasions, when light is just right, I would agree that a model's scheme is highly visible and maybe some benefit can be had by a busy scheme. And the intangible but true, young eyes can generally see it better than old
MattK