Thanks to millard for confirming that I’m not crazy - at least with regard to my recollections of the Revell Mayflower(s).
I agree totally about the old Imai ships. I don’t think I ever built one completely, but I remember them as being beautifully molded and ingeniously designed. That Cutty Sark was a real beauty. And even those little 1/350 sailing schoolships, some of which have recently surfaced again under other labels, are very much worth building.
My big complaint with Heller sailing ships has always been that the company put aesthetics first and history a long, long way second. I spent a long time on the Heller Soleil Royal when it initially appeared, back in the seventies - and I admit the result was, in terms of visual impact, pretty spectacular. The “carvings” on that kit are a match for the very finest of the old British Board Room models. That’s the highest compliment I can pay to such things. But when I found some pictures of the contemporary model on which the kit was based (in those days I didn’t do my research adequately in advance) I was furious. The Heller designers made an utter mess of the stern structure, and distorted the proportions of the underwater hull almost beyond recognition. They also made the decks perfectly flat - which virtually no sailing ship’s decks ever were. Most of the other Heller kits of that period have similar problems - or worse ones. A company that produced airplane or tank kits to that standard of accuracy would, even in those days, have been laughed out of the business.
With H.M.S. Victory, it seems, the Heller people started getting serious about scale ship modeling. That one is, in terms of accuracy, on a different planet. It has some amusing problems (the Heller people apparently didn’t realize that yards are supposed to be fastened to masts, and somebody on the design staff thought belaying pins were supposed to have sharp points), but the hull is a near-perfect representation of the real thing, the decks have camber (and curved deck beams to make sure they keep it), and in general it’s a serious scale model.
The other Heller kit that I really, really like is the galley La Reale. I’ve got one of them in the attic awaiting my attention. (It’s been awaiting my attention for quite a few years now; it’s a rather intimidating project.) I’m no expert on French galleys, but according to the drawings I’ve looked at this kit is a masterpiece. About the only way I can see to improve it would be to replace the handles on the oars (quite a project, in view of their numbers). Several other recent Heller kits (the chebec and the Gorch Fock, for instance) seem to be on the same level, though I haven’t built them.
I share Millard’s and Jake’s enthusiasm for the good ol’ Revell Constitution. It’s showing its age by now, but at the time it was released it represented the state of the art - and to my eye it still holds up pretty well. It must have taken some nerve on the part of the designers to represent the ship in her 1814 configuration, knowing that tourists who visited the real ship would notice lots of differences. (The transom decorations, for instance, don’t look anything like the kit’s - but that’s because they got altered after the War of 1812.) The three-piece decks of the Revell Constitution and Cutty Sark do present problems. (Three cheers for Heller, for figuring out that the right way to make a big deck in several pieces is to split it lengthwise, along the planking seams.) But they represent a genuine effort by knowledgeable people to reproduce sailing ships accurately in plastic.
Looming over this whole discussion, though, is the sad, overwhelming fact that all these kits are so old. The numbers are sobering. Revell has been producing plastic kits since 1953 - fifty-two years. It released its first sailing ship kit, the 18" Constitution, in 1956, and the last one, the “Quick-Build Viking Ship,” in 1977. (The Heller Victory also appeared in about 1977, if I remember correctly. How many aircraft or armor kits dating from that time are still taken seriously?) So Revell made new sailing ship kits for twenty-one years, and quit twenty-eight years ago. That company, in other words, has been out of the sailing ship business longer than it was in it - and for more than half of its lifetime. And more than half of mine. And the Heller Victory has been around for more than a decade longer than the college freshmen who will be showing up in my classroom next August. I feel old.
If companies like Tamiya, Dragon, and Hasegawa were designing and producing sailing ships today, what might they look like? Imagine a Tamiya 1/96 Flying Cloud - and a set of Verlinden aftermarket parts for it.
Some people would argue that sailing ships don’t really make good subjects for plastic kits, and maybe they’d be right. Styrene, as most participants in this forum seem to agree, is not a good material for such things as masts and yards. (Let’s not talk about vac-formed “sails.”) But it does seem like the plastic kit industry has turned its back on a significant phase of model building. Those old kits may not have made much money for their manufacturers, but they stirred the initial interest of some young people (including this one) in ship modeling and maritime history. The world of model building is the worse for the demise of the plastic sailing ship kit.