Fantastic work! As one of the judges at a few (very few) R/C scale contests, the only item I have noticed (and promise me you will make no changes) is on the throttle face. The original full scale documentation provided, uses all uppercase letters while you have used upper & lowercase. Keep in mind, one of the reasons why my control line scale friends and I were not invited to more contests as judges was because of the very loud protests of one of the favored participants when he began screaming, "They count the stripes". The particular model was one of a full scale demo team flying biplanes with a sunburst of eleven stripes on the top wing and the contestant had painted only three. One other occasion taught me to not stand near the judges while they are scoring. The model was a very nice PBY and was scoring high, when the owner standing next to me commented to his friend, "I didn't have time to complete the struts last night". I had completely missed the PBY had no struts because of the overwhelming quality of the build & finish. I had to change my score slightly.
Spl Ed,
Glad to hear you mention of the upper & lower case letters on the throttle face. I actually tried to squeeze in all upper case letters on the large template of the throttle face but I found out it didn't have the room! This is a classic example of trying to accommodate the letters with the existing template format.
The letters at the time only came in specific sizes & their shapes were more wide than the upper cased letters used on the full sized Mustangs. Not by much, but enough to make a difference between my choice of using both upper & lower case.
Good call!
Regarding the judges & their decisions on he contestant's models, according to several judges from RCSBuilders site of which I'm an active member, they're supposed to strictly follow the documentation. In other words, the judges are supposed to have no intimate knowledge of the subject being judged but rather rely heavily on the provided documentation.
This is where many builders of the model screws up. Most contest participants build their model/s & then try to find the documents to match. It should be the other way around.
The differences between scoring a place on the podium & losing is often within just a decimal point or two. The way a contestant can earn extra brownie points over another of the same aircraft type being modeled is through documentation. He/she must call to the judge's attention the subtle differences or addition of an accessory or a particular function of the aircraft.
It's ironic this topic is being brought up on this ww2aircraft site is because this very same subject is also currently being discussed on the RCSBuilders site. In this case, it's the Grumman A-6 Intruder series.
To hedge one's model of say, an EA-6B Prowler over a model of another EA-6B Prowler, both of the same kit, is to call to the judge's attention through documentation that only on the EA-6B does the inner gear doors close after retraction or extension just like the inner gear doors of the Mustang, whereas the two-place A-6 Intruder inner gear doors remain in the opened position.
To the contestant who protested, have them try to learn from their mistakes & improve. Funny that the PBY was judged & then revised based upon hearing another person's mentioning of the missing struts. If the docs show that particular aircraft had missing struts, then that model should be judged based on the merits of the presentation.
I could never match up to the overall quality of some of these models, both plastic displays as well as wooden R/C, but I learn from them & try.
Well done!