Following Ian's kind invitation to join in here, I'm now going to send my bytes down to you.
As a debut gift, I do have something in my backpack for you (I suppose you have seen some german backpackers before, don't you...?

It's a repaint for the Alpha Bleu Ciel F4U-7 Corsair, depicting the restored warbird NZ5648 (civil registration G-BXUL) in its 2001 european airshow scheme, before it returned to New Zealand in 2004.
I doubt whether this scheme was historically correct, but it sure looked nice then:
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Untitled-(T...sair/1581194/L/
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Goodyear-FG...sair/1261996/L/
The real NZ5648 of course is a Goodyear-built FG-1D (F4U-1D). The model I used for this repaint is a carrier-based F4U-7, originally built for the french Navy (AU-1 variant). The most obvious differences of the F4U-7 compared to the FG-1D are
- number of prop blades (4 instead of 3),
- rocket racks underneath the wings,
- four .79 inch/20 mm cannons instead of six .50/12,7 mm guns,
- tailhook (the land-based FG-1D had no hook),
- exhaust's position.
Due to position of the cowl flaps and their texture mapping, the white belly area also had to be set some upwards...
I hope you can live with this in-accuracy!







Presuming to find the biggest knowledge base on NZ warbirds here, I'd like to know if anything can be improved on this repaint or if I disregarded something (within the model's limitations...).
Please let me know before this Bent Wing is to be released on AVSIM and Flightsim.
Cheers,
Markus.



















