You are inconsistent. You claim side-profile comparisons of two airplanes are baseless and yet, you use a picture-comparison to bolster your claim. Also, was that picture comparison originally made by you?
I did not claim a side profile comparison was baseless. I said assuming pixels of two pictures represented the same lengths, and wheels and cockpits of two planes representing the same size was baseless.
In the case of the pixels, if you had two pictures of the exact same object, but one had a smaller pixel count of the other, one pixel in the smaller picture would not represent the same length as one pixel in the bigger picture.
Pictures are a fine way to estimate when you have an objective reference point, something that can stay constant. I cannot tell whether Person A is taller than Person B if I just had a picture of each. If however, I had a picture of Person A standing with Yao Ming and another of Person B with Yao Ming, I can tell relatively who is taller. Then if I know Yao Ming's height, I can find the heights of Person A and Person B using ratios. It seems like you and asymptote tried to do that using cockpit sizes and wheel sizes. However, the problem is we don't know if the Su-27 uses the same sized cockpit and same sized wheel. That is where the bad assumptions come in. How do you know the J-20's cockpit size isn't 30% bigger, or the Su-27's wheel is 20% smaller? We can intuit that it isn't, but we can never be sure.
The picture I just posted overcomes that problem, because it's the exact same truck parked in front of the J-10 and the J-20. Even if we don't know the length of the truck, we can use the J-10's length, which we do know, to find the truck's length. Then we can use the truck's length to find the J-20's. Now, there is a question of whether perspective difference and the distance and angle difference between where the truck is parked in each is negligible. That would be a potential source of error, but at least we have one fixed variable, whereas a comparison between the Su-27 and J-20 side views have no shared fixed variables (Unless we know they shared a part, like the cockpit or the wheel--ironically the method you and asymptote used would have worked to find the YF-23's length, because we know it used the F-15's cockpit and wheel).
I do not claim credit for that picture. It came out in the first week of the J-20's revelation from another bbs, and Blitzo, I, and other forum members used it to get an estimate of the J-20's length, aware that it might not be completely accurate due to the aforementioned errors. That this picture wasn't commonly distributed has been unfortunate.
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Furthermore, I provided a rough estimate that the J-20 was the size of a Su-27. After Asymptote conducted a detailed analysis and concluded it was smaller than a Su-27, it should have been obvious that the J-20 was about another meter smaller. I did not feel it was necessary to piggyback on Asymptote's post to make a refined estimate of 20.9m.
Again, I apologize for being picky, but the criticisms were more about methodology than result. I do not doubt many people presumed it was around the size of a Su-27, but regardless of the result methodology was just a bad one.
Between my post, insights, and Asymptote's pixel-by-pixel analysis, we came very close to the J-20's actual size. What is with the b.s. criticism that is being heaped on our hard work?
Getting the right results does not mean using the right methodology.
For example, if I did a general comparison of the F-18 and F-15 using cockpit length, I would have to assume they were around the same length, when the F-15's cockpit is simply just more spacious than the F-18's. There was no hard reason for us to believe the Su-27 and J-20 had the same size cockpit even though we can intuitively guess that would be the case. Just going off that assumption to make a length estimate is basically a shot in the dark.
What the hell is this (see below)? You guys trolling me? I think I'll start putting your group of idiots on ignore.
Nope, just grading your homework. If you'd like to explain how you know for a fact the Su-27's cockpit and wheel sizes are the same as the J-20's please go for it. You might have caught onto something other people have overlooked.
