ORIGINAL: Ben Lanterman
the big FAI ships although I have never understood the little T that one of them has just behind the canopy area. All he needed to do was make the vertical tail just a smidgeon bigger.
Those little "T"s are perfect examples of that competition and the competitors. There is a chance the originator added it for show and it's affect on the judges. The contest there is more presentation than precision nowadays. Anything that impresses the judges works.
Now Dick, do you really want me to believe you designed the airplanes - or - perhaps you designed the structure inside of the exterior shape? All you have done is put a skeleton inside of a great looking shape......
Most of our models that're based on full scale have more design in them than the uninitiated would ever expect. And it's not just the structural decisions that make them fly well as models. Dick isn't the first or last to use an existing full scale as the basis of an aerobatic model. But I'd bet big money that he, like almost all the rest of us who design models for model performance events and chose full scale, didn't lose a moments sleep over changing any measurement on the suckers. I daresay there probably isn't one model in a hundred that's designed for aerobatics that's based on a fullscale that has more than one or two measurements to scale. And all the others are fudged on purpose. And the purpose is to suit what the designer wants out of the model.