Is the Tiger II porsche turret alone better on either of these kits? i.e.: should the Bandai turret replace the Tamiya? or just stick with the Tamiya. I thought I remember talk of the cupola sticking out like a sore thumb on the Tamiya?
I sold my Bandai KTs on eBay so I can no longer directly compare the two. The Tamiya KT cupolas are too high, not by much, but enough to affect the proportions of the parts. Naturally they are molded into the turret shells so you can't just nip off the offending extra height before attaching them in place. No, you have to cut them off (without scarring any of the turret roof details), trim them and then put them back. All of this falls under "what's acceptable to the modeler." Some people see every error as a high tragedy, others care only if the model looks close enough to the original to suit them.
Perhaps it's like having perfect pitch in music. People who have perfect pitch, who can hear every note exactly as it sounds, usually can't STAND wrong notes - it's like listening to nails scraped across a blackboard. Others are virtually tone deaf; they can't tell whether or not a note is in tune, and it doesn't bother them.
Gaston does seem at times to be able to pick up on shape discrepancies in photos that many others miss, and I confess that, while I think he's wrong about using photos over good plans as the primary judging criteria for accuracy, he has found things like the low front grill on the Tamiya GMC 6x6 truck. That is something that can be seen well in photos because it is a matter of proportion rather than measurements. Where I think Gaston goes wrong is his apparent refusal to understand that all photographs distort their subjects in different ways, depending on the lens AND the subject. Most late war German tanks had sloped armor. This means that the top of the armor is farther away from the camera than the bottom, and thus the top part of the sloped armor will appear smaller and more sloped than it really is by measurement.
Note that most combat photographs were taken with what are called "normal" lenses. These are the lenses that most closely reproduce what the human eye would see. The focal length of a "normal" lens depends on the film size being used. With 35mm film cameras, the normal lens is 50mm (2 inches). With the 4x5 Crown Graphics used by a lot of US combat photographers, the normal lens would have been much longer, I think about 105mm, but I'm not sure of the length. The point is, these normal lenses reproduce the perspective distortion we see through our eyes. This looks normal to us, so we don't think of the photos as distorted, but they are, compared to the real objects and people being photographed.
The problem one faces in using mostly photos to judge model accuracy is you can't be 100% sure how much distortion is in the pictures you are using. First, you'd have to know the slope of the armor on the vehicle being photographed, the distance to the camera, the length of the camera lens (we'll assume a "normal" lens), the height of the camera above the subject or above ground level, and other factors. You have to know if the camera lens was perfectly level, or did the photographer have to tilt the lens upward slightly to get all the vehicle in the picture? Since most combat photography was hand-held, I'd guess that relatively few photos were taken with the camera lens perfectly horizontal. But all these factors lead to even more distortion in the photographs, even if it is not readily apparent.
And this all pertains while using the "normal" lenses that distort less than the other focal lengths. The ONLY lenses that can represent objects in anything approaching their true shape are very long telephoto lenses that, because of their very long focal lengths, essentially remove the effects of perspective from the resulting photographs. If you have ever seen airshow photos where the B-17s have little pointed noses and huge tails, that's the telephoto lens distortion (actually, the lack of perspective distortion). On the opposite track, look at the obvious distortions in pictures of tanks and guns packed together in museums - there, most photos are taken with wide angle lenses to get in the whole vehicle in a restricted space. Wide angle lenses increase and accentuate perspective distortion, with huge muzzle brakes in the foreground and little turrets in the background. Nobody believes these photos are realistic at all; the obvious wide angle distortions are seen as the price we pay to have any photos of museum vehicles that usually are parked cheek by jowl to save space in museum buildings.
So, the only way you could photograph a vehicle (say, a Panther tank) to represent its actual size and shape would be to park a museum Panther in the middle of an open field and use a long telephoto lens (at least 500 mm; 1000mm would be better) to photograph it from exactly the center of each side, and the center line of the front aspect and the rear. Then, and only then, would you have in effect orthographic (literally, "true drawing") renditions of the major ground-level views of a Panther tank. To get the undistorted top view, you'd have to go up in a helicopter and hover over the tank several hundred yards up as you took the picture.
Or, you can crawl over, around, and under said museum Panther tank, with tape measure, protractor, and level, and produce several dozen (or several hundred) measurements and detailed notes on angles, intersections, tangents, etc., and then use a vector-based CAD program to create a set of plans as close to the original shape as humanly possible. I have not seen the Steel Masters plans Gaston has referred to, so I cannot comment on them. But, I am curious as to why he thinks those plans are the cat's pajamas while thinking the PanzerTracts or other Panther plans out there are no good. I have no dog in this hunt except that Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle have been measuring and drawing German vehicles for over 40 years now, There is no one out there with their individual or combined experience in doing this sort of work, and I don't believe myself that other plans are likely to be better. As good, certainly; better or more accurate, not likely. I'm open to being convinced, but I'll need to see them first.
As for the gun differences in the Tamiya kits, I never said Tamiya didn't make mistakes. Tamiya has made errors on most of their kits, some of commission (the kit is wrong in some measure of accuracy) or omission (they simplified the kit and left off important details). But even here, good (accurate) plans would be the best way to check, because any photo taken with a normal length lens will not be able to represent the gun barrel accurately. It is physically impossible for a short (normal) lens to render a long object without distorting it. So, we are back to square one: Gaston insists that photos can be used as the primary source for determing scale fidelity of a model kit, and I do not believe that. I believe that good quality accurate plans are in fact much more useful. Photos can often point to proportional differences that can highlight errors, but those errors will more often be those of details and not the whole vehicle. I think we must simply agree to disagree, because we do disagree on this, whether we care to acknowledge it or not.
Obviously you have a great insight and attention for details. But I'm beginning to wonder if you're having any fun making models like the rest of us. I have a real problem watching movies like "Patton" because the tanks used by the Germans are not WW2. However the merits of the movie outweigh the discrepancies with regards to the props. Not every model kit is perfect, but considering the alternative of no kits or having to scratchbuild everything I think we should count our blessings. I know you've taken some lumps on your views in this forum but I appreciate your attention to detail. I just think you have to give a little more credit to the manufacturers. They have to make a profit and if they cut a few corners to do so, so be it. I still think that this is the very best time for '48 scalers, and we should take advantage of all the good products that are out there, no matter what their flaws.
The Bandai Porshe turret is awful, but still has some marginal shapes that I tried to combine with the Tamiya Porshe turret.
The main problem of the Tamiya Porshe turret, aside the cupola and front deck plate slope, is the lack of sloping of the curved sides. This has proved unsurmountable to me despite serious efforts at trying to replicate this bizarre and interesting shape, using a complicated mixture of both turrets... I would highly recommend you try modifying instead the regular Tamiya Henshel turret, NOT the Porshe! Even that still needs some laborious help;
-Very slight tilt of front and back plates (barely any...)
-Slightly less slope on the top rear turret deck plate.
-MUCH more slope on the top front turret deck plate!
-The bigger Tamiya Porshe muzzle brake looks more plausible than the minuscule item provided on the two-piece barrel, but this requires the Henshel two-piece barrel to be thicker somehow at the neck, as tragically the thicker and better Tamiya one-piece barrel was never mounted as is on the Henshel turret... The Henshel turret barrel looks too thin, so perhaps a careful spinning slathering of putty between the fingers would do the trick to thicken it enough at the muzzle brake base? ANY thickening would go a long way...
I will eventually use a seriously thinned and shortened Track 48 brass barrel (out of production)for this, IF a better kit does not come along beforehand...
Unless after-market barrels offers beefier solutions, the skinny stock two-piece barrel and its minuscule muzzle brake are a real problem for achieving the Tiger II, along with a noticeably missing increased slant of the lower bow plate, 0.5mm more glacis plate lenght at the front hull edge, and maybe a smaller hull mg position, all of which are probably best left alone...
I've tried to follow the logic of your posts, but it tends to make my brain hurt
The way you approach determining what you believe to be the correct and real shape for an object as big as a tank escapes me entirely. You say you haven't seen many of the modern drawings, but the ones you have compared to photos have problems? One cannot compare photos to drawings, period. As Bruce so aptly explained, the camera sees like our eyes, and distance and perspective are introduced.
Hilary Doyle has been crawling on tanks for years measuring them, then making the most accurate drawings he can. That doesn't mean that every one is perfect, but we're all human and when you're trying to do something that involved and work with that much data, it isn't easy not to make a slip here and there. As Tim says, factory drawings or doing accurate measurements on the actual prototype vehicle are the only way to determine the exact shapes.
If I were to get the opportunity to measure a Jagdpanther, I would, and I have a damned good knowledge of how to do this correctly. The first thing I would do was to establish the correct edges, dimensions and angles of the body plates. The rest would follow from this foundation. This is the empirical baseline. I doubt that Hilary Doyle got the opportunity to go this route then screwed up.
If your photos don't agree, that's not surprising. I can take three pictures of the side of a Jagdpanther from three places very close together, and make the superstructure look slightly different in shape in each one. The normally objective way of evaluating a kit's shape as to correctness is to compare the physical kit parts against drawings that you have a high degree of confidence in. Photos are great for detail and colouration patterns and markings and mods, etc., but for true dimensions they are almost useless due to parallax error.
In your posts you express your suspicions as firm fact, without being in any way certain. In my case I would tend to use a modifier like "I suspect" or "it is my perception" or "it seems to me". Your method of baldly stating what you see as fatal errors rattles my cage, as does the affirmation that a kit is "unbuildable". There's no such thing, as my mis-spent modelling youth has taught me. That is just your disdain speaking, and it involves your level of pickyness, which is not put forth, only a broad-spectrum condemnation. Ease up, my man!
It's just a hobby and I try to do some very exacting stuff myself, but I don't get on forums accusing manufacturers of getting a subject dead wrong without some solid proof. If you are able to get over your fixation on photographic comparisons and do some actual museum-visiting and tank measuring, your suspicions may help the hobby in a big way. These may be things that nobody caught before, but they may also be long-established knowns and you find your theories are unfounded. Back yourself up before you start slinging poop.
Remember that most German tank manufacturers did not fabricate the armor assemblies; those were done by specialized armor fabricators. So, it is possible that the most accurate plans for the armor bodies were used by those armor fabricators. The reference drawings I've seen for the Henschel Tiger I and Tiger II are excellent, but I don't know to what extent they had similar clean drawings for the entire vehicle. It appears that Henschel never had the time to catch up with the changes on the production line, and the Tiger Is and IIs were mostly built using red-lined build plans. Nonetheless, the majority of German vehicles appear to have been documented fairly well, and some very well indeed. Others, of course, are seen only in a very few photos with no other information available. Again, since Tom and Hilary have been doing their research for 40 years, there is no one else with their experience just on doing this kind of work.
The oversize brass muzzle brake was cut off, and the lenght cut down to match either of the Tamiya Tiger II barrels.
Then, and here is the time-consuming part, I pinched some heavy-duty 220 or 180 grit sandpaper around the front barrel section only, by finger pressure alone but with two superglued "stiffeners" on the back, made of plastic sprues, to spread the pressure evenly, while the barrel base was fixed in a heavy-duty drill, and spun this contraption for a LONG while. The heat build-up was surprisingly tolerable.
It needed a LOT of thinning. I thinned it until it matched the Tamiya Porshe barrel thickness or even slightly less, as the Porshe barrel has almost no step with the muzzle brake's base, which is not quite right... Then the Porshe muzzle brake can be superglued on it.
