Originally Posted by BEC

Lee, edited my post.

I will say that Rex's rationale seems plausible. The motor hooks with the finger tabs do need to go over further to install/remove a motor and maybe someone at Estes (before John Boren) decided that momentarily deforming the base of the body tube to get the motor in or out was not a good idea for the target users of the kit.

The details of the motor mount assembly have changed several times that I know of and I'm still gathering data for where I have gaps in the chronology. But this last change - to push the motor mount assembly aft 1/4 inch - is pretty recent. It's happened in the last handful of years.

The reason I asked Bob Sanford about the face card of that new packaging is that up to the latest ones I've see, the projecting motor tube is not shown in the illustrations. Instead it's flush to the aft end of the body tube as it has been since the beginning of the Alpha. Yet more minutiae.....