Actually there behind the intake itself there is a hump before it depresses downwards, highlighted in yellow
View attachment 153825
Viewed from our angle, but on the opposite side of the aircraft, it is highlighted and seen as below
View attachment 153826
Notice in the lower image how the highlighted portion is almost as long as the IWB main door, in perspective. The IWB is known to stretch across around a third of the plane. But this hump is less than a tenth.
Specifically from the side profile illustration (first quoted image), I measure the actual length of the highlighted hump to be 41px/577px ~= 7%, including the forward-swept cowl. If I just measure the length starting from the connection to the fuselage, I get half of that, 20px or 3.5%.
In the second quoted image, however, I measure a (47px, 11px) diagonal which has length 48.2 px for the bump in yellow along where it attaches to the fuselage. The main bay door is ||(56, 15)|| = 57.9 px, and the side bay door is ||(39, 11)|| = 40.5 px. So, the actual ratio is 48/58 = 0.83, whereas it should be 0.1. This is nearly an order of magnitude difference.
Even if there was significant widening of the intake manifold so that it was at a slight angle, say the intake widens at around 20º from the central axis of the plane (a lot! would be hella drag), we would only expect a factor of sin(140º)/sin(160º) ~= two increase to at most a ratio of 0.2 relative to the main IWB bay door from this perspective, which is still a factor of 4 away from what is illustrated! This is to say that this theory for the hump is just not plausible.
I'm outlining a more reasonable estimate of what the yellow region should really look like below -- you can actually see a sort of "humped" portion if you zoom in very closely. This measures (8px, 4px) which is about 9px across, which is far more reasonable, but possibly still a bit of an overestimate (1.5x what it should be in an ideal case, but could be explained by a slight widening of ~10 degrees).
I don't think that's the case, because a depression of the dorsal intake/fuselage when looked at from this frontal offset angle would not directly visually "travel" to the exhaust like that. Instead it would be mostly wholly obscured from this angle. I.e. it "should" look more like a hump from this angle rather than a direct, highly angled drop.
The reason the drop is so exaggerated from this angle is because the central intake tapers down
and in towards the exhaust. It is not only not level, but also tapers inward a bit, since the intake is quite wide, wider than the exhausts -- we know this because the intake is already much more than a third of the width of the fuselage at this angle, while the exhausts are equal in size. At a nearly head-on angle, the foreshortening will make it appear like a sudden drop. I believe this is illustrated the best with the line connecting from the top left corner of the intake to the top left corner of the exhaust. You can see that, even with significant play in where the central exhaust actually ends up, the line drawn makes it clear that the intake manifold should cut well inside of the silhouette you have drawn in red.
The CG in
#3318 is from a slightly higher-up and more side-on position, but you can see how quickly the manifold drops down and that it does not extend all the way to the left engine hump. In
#3317 you can see how the side profile is accurate to previous observations, including the side-on images we have been discussing. Note especially the "groove" between the nacelles!.
The left exhaust is not actually "jutting out" -- that's because we cannot actually see the rear of the aircraft from this angle.
The entire rear of the aircraft, either due to photo resolution issues or AI post processing, is basically fully gone.
I don't think we have any reason to believe so. It is not typical for AI post processing, which largely consists of sharpening and other convolutions, to erase parts of an image as you describe. There is nothing as far as I can tell that is supposed to be there that isn't, the hump from the S-duct of the intakes block the exhaust from direct view, as expected -- please correct me if I am mistaken. Even if it were the case, it would not invalidate any previous statements.
However, I positioned the left and right exhausts where they would be at the rear, in the position that is at the same immediate rearward position to each respective air intake from a fuselage perspective.
With this level of foreshortening, it is easy to misjudge the position of the exhausts by eye. The position of the exhausts you've marked are not consistent relative to their intakes, see below. The trapezoidal intakes complicates things a bit (they "twist" in opposite directions), but the red line marks the path between the centroids which will not affected by this.
A more consistent estimate would be something like this
But regardless, any of these illustrations are already accurate enough to show the most important part, which is the essentially-straight line from the intake to the exhaust, cutting inside the big silhouette.
