Ryan NYP addendum

Almost by chance I just found out that the Frog kit of the Spirit of St. Louis is NOT the same mold -as stated in many reviews and kit research sites- as the Testors/Hawk kit. In fact, it looks much better. The ribbing effect is there, in a relief form, not as furrows like in the Testors kit. Wing and stab come as two upper/lower halves, not as one piece of plastic. I do not have a Frog kit at the moment, so I can't comment much more on it, but so far it looks to me as a much better starting point than the Testors/Hawk version.
Since I want to build the Japanese NYP-2, I will try to get a Frog kit and perhaps post a comparative review/building article.
That teaches you not to take everything you see posted out there as the ultimate truth. Same goes for plans and historic backgrounds, which most of  times need some kind of "adjustment". The fact that you have a plan against which you compare kit parts means close to zero, since no plans of the same subject EVER are exactly the same (unless one is a copy of another). Spans and lengths and other measures of the real planes often differ in some degree. All of this is even truer for the early aviation subjects some of us like to model.
Always compare to photos, read as much sources as you can, and never assume you "got it absolutely right".
The misfortune is that contemporary -to us- information is taken from publications or descriptions that not always are 100% correct, and since we do not generally have access to the real thing, the info is just copied and so mistakes and errors are perpetuated.
By the way, your scanner and printer further slightly deform the images, so please do not think you are the Millimeter Crusader trying to find minute differences in the kit you are building/reviewing.
Reality is fuzzier than we would like it to be. But you still can be happy.