adywan said:

The ship in ep3 isn't anything like the Tantive IV. If it was indeed supposed to be that ship then the CG modellers did a piss poor job as they look completely different

I tweeted Leland Chee about, because I always loved that symmetry, and have been thinking about continuity a lot recently, and he replied with this: "@trentontaylor A pity to toss aside the Vanguard retrofit retcon, but since Clone Wars used the Classic trilogy model, I saw no choice."

I'm guessing the original logic was Tantive IV was a heavily retrofitted version of the ship we saw in Ep. III, but that changed due to a Clone Wars appearance of one of the two ships. It's been too long since I watched that Clone Wars episode to say.

EDIT: Is there anyway to disable WYSIWYG and fix this post?