What is the quality, ease in assembling, # of Cannon on the Jolly Roger, scales of both ships?
Both those kits are reissues of Lindberg kits that were originally issued in the 1960s. The “Jolly Roger” was originally a French frigate, La Flore, and the “Captain Kidd” was originally a German two-decked warship, the Wappen von Hamburg.
The names under which they’re currently being sold have nothing whatever to do with reality. Apparently the current proprietors of Lindberg think anything with a name associated with pirates will sell. (They’re sticking pirate names on a couple of old Pyro ship kits, as well.) Neither La Flore nor the Wappen von Hamburg had anything to do with piracy. Both were large warships - far bigger and more expensive to operate than any pirate could afford. The piratical-sounding names are nothing more or less than a twentieth-century marketing stunt.
I don’t know what scale they’re on; my guess is somewhere between 3/32" = 1’ and 1/16" = 1’ (i.e., between 1/128 and 1/192). If I remember correctly, La Flore (“Jolly Roger”) has about 40 guns, and the Wappen von Hamburg has about sixty. Maybe somebody who actually has the kits in hand (I don’t) can correct me.
Actually, if the kits are shorn of their ridiculous labels they aren’t too bad. They’re clearly sixties-era products, and suffer from all the limitations that are endemic to plastic sailing ship kits - some out-of-scale details, overly-flexible spars, overstated “wood grain” detail, etc. But they were at least as good as most other sailing ship kits of the period - and in some ways superior to many that have come along since. They have one feature that none of the Revell or Airfix kits of the era had: all of their decks that have guns on them run the full length of the hulls. (No “dummy” guns plugged into holes in the sides, or guns sitting on little platforms cast integrally with the hull halves.) In the right hands they can be turned into eminently respectable scale models.
Thanks for the Info, now the La Flore is the one I am most interested in and well the reason why I asked was I was going to make a diorama of a British ship against a french one, “typical” combat and of course have the British ship winning [:P]. That is of course if I can eventually get the kits. I was hoping that you would mention that the scale was roughly 1/160 so I could use N Scale people for the crew. I might just have them re-enacting a sail battle on my dad’s N Scale Layout