To help explain what started all this, here are the original profile photos that got the ball rolling...:
http://www.warbirdphotographs.com/NavyBWZeros/A6M7-M63-4_small.jpg
http://www.warbirdphotographs.com/NavyBWZeros/Zero-96.jpg
The more critical first photo has a bigger more complete version here:
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j215/jicehem/Photoavecreprages_.jpg
Measuring various individual items on the larger photo (1/35.5 on my screen), such as the rudder hinge dogleg that is an actual 4.2" (106 mm) in lenght, made the whole aircraft come out at about 8.92 M. vs the quoted 9.06 m. lenght for the "known" Zero.
Seemingly confirming this, by matching precisely the canopy lenghts to scale, front and back, on the two smaller photos, I created a 6-8" shortfall in the Nakajima A6M7 tail versus the Mitsubishi A6M5 at take-off, but NO real mismatch at the front in cowling size/diameter etc...
Also the Hasegawa kit came up at 4" short compared to the new Tamiya, looking better against the big factory photo, and thus egging me on...
Even now, looking at this seemingly very neutral and unperturbed profile photo (better centered by half I think than the added red line would indicate), I do not see a photo severely afflicted by the partial distortion of the "fishbowl" effect... Minor elements seem to scale out roughly to the lenght, but a slightly shorter lenght...
I think there may be something specific about the Zero's shape that maybe conceals variations in angles or distortions: a lack of straight lines anywhere in the rear fuselage body maybe...
I have made seven other profiles visible here, some slightly hurt by conversion from Corel to PDF:
Advanced Air Force Variant
I have since massively improved these drawings, and the "Air Force" boardgame cards and rules, with much new surprising comparative data (E-mail me to get them free at -
Gaston1_01@hotmail.com - if you are interested), but even in this old outdated version, you can see all my profiles are quite OK, and better than many others in general outline... The Zero is the only one that really confounded my photo overlaying method, my old Zero drawing seen here being close to the 1/48th Hasegawa kit; 4" shorter than the correct Tamiya, but still looking better against the above big photo than the Tamiya, which fails to overlay it completely... But then the Tamiya does match better the Zero at take-off...
I am now in the position where either the big photo is of a one-off aircraft with a tail prototype (unlikely!), or it does have some selective fishbowl distortion that looks very neutral and discrete, maybe thanks to some of the elements of the Zero's shape...
When, in addition to this, I saw the line-up photo, I felt the differences in parking angles were not in line with the differences in tail appearance, but obviously I was wrong...
I think the seven fairly good profiles I made show that my method of choosing 90° neutral profile photos can yield good results, if the photos are not taken from too close, but obviously in the case of the Zero this failed...
The point I wanted to make is that the "line-up" photo was far from being my only starting point for this whole misguided theory...
Sorry again for the "much ado about little"...
Gaston