Ok, as I've been working on my Corsair skins, I've been running into a frustrating discrepancy in the colors. While the blue-gray on gray scheme I think is fairly accurate, the problem is mostly with the tricolor (and to an extent the late-war solid blue).
I'm not so concerned with the white or intermediate blue, those look fairly good, but I AM concerned with the top color.
At the site Kev linked, they list TWO seperate colors: Semi-gloss Sea Blue (what I used on the updated Ramblin' Wreck, and the two tricolor VF-17 machines) and Flat Sea Blue for the tricolor (IIRC, originally they used the semi-gloss but went with flat because it resisted fading better in the sun).
Here's the problem: Neither color matches that of the tricolor scheme of any restored F4U I've seen photos of. Nor does it match any of the color plates I've used for reference, or the AeroMaster decal set paint charts. The Semi-gloss looks closer to the AeroMaster decal charts, but looks a bit more gray than the restored Corsairs and color plates (which is generally just a dark blue). Flat Sea Blue looks even grayer than that (not SIGNIFICANTLY, but noticeably so).
Here's Ramblin Wreck showing all three variations of tricolor:
More of just a dark blue, closer to the color plates/restored Corsairs.
Semi-gloss Sea Blue
Flat Sea Blue
The difference between the three IS noticeable, although again not so much between the Semi-gloss and Flat Sea Blues.
So what's going on here? Are the color plates and restored birds THAT off? Is the RGB color chart wrong? Does anyone know of a color picture that shows an ACTUAL tricolor Corsair during the war (which itself is suspect due to the primitive medium)?
Other websites give entirely DIFFERENT shades of blue entirely that are MUCH darker than this. If it was a slight difference I wouldn't mind so much, but this is quite noticeable. This is ALSO an issue with the 1D Corsairs, which the Glossy Sea Blue attributed to late-war USN aircraft is FAR lighter than traditionally shown.
