brimforge said:

sorry, wrong!

as I wrote above and none cared, I took it upon me to repose the shot with an live-model of the X-Wing, and the result differs very strong, the front engine should be visible, more or less like in Ronsters picture ...

I will post some pics later, but the result would mean, that in studio for better visual the front engine was removed, so to have a better closeup of R2 ;-)

None of the miniature/kit images I looked at really helped me in this instance brimforge, as I couldn't find one taken of that portion of the X-Wing from that exact *angle*...and they didn't really convey the actual size of the large gap between where the Artoo and engine would be on the full-sized studio version. Also, I'm not sure how accurately-proportioned some of the models I looked at are. In addition, there may be a bit of difference between how things look when filmed by a movie camera compared to how things look when someone takes a snap of a small model, but I'll be interested to see your pics.

As your last sentence above suggests, if the camera POV isn't positioned in a vantage point somewhere in the gap between Artoo and engine, then I can alternatively look on it's vantage point as being positioned somewhere where the engine would *physically be* instead. Either way, I agree the engine would have been 'removed' from view because we wouldn't actually see it from either of these POV's I've described.

But equally, I like the look of Ronster's mock-up too...although I'm not sure how many similar instances adywan would end up having to do this throughout the original trilogy, or if he'd want to do all that additional work, if so.