Yes, unfortunately! Nothing wrong with a shortie, but an Explorer cries for a long scale IMHO. Of course, when those first Explorers were made, there were no Gibson long scales so it wasn't an option. And by the time the TBird came out, the whole modernistic line had already flopped commercially and been deleted though I have read that Ray Dietrich's TBird design was based on the Explorer which he liked best from all the (failed) modernistic guitar shapes Ted McCarty showed him when he asked Ray to come up with something new. Looking at an Explorer and a TBird and thinking of how some people even mistake the two that might be true.
My short scale Explorer actually sounds a liitle TBirdish, but then it has Bicentennial TBird pups in similar positions as a TB so what do you expect other!