As I mentioned earlier, several methods of stating a ship's length were common in the seventeenth century - and several sets of dimensions for the Prince are floating around. I've seen her original "length of keel" stated as 131' and 141'. In any case, that dimension isn't of much help in this particular exercise because it can only be measured approximately on the Airfix kit. The fore and aft ends of the keel - i.e., the points where the keel meets the stem and sternpost - aren't indicated on the kit parts. (Usually the sternpost sat on top of the keel, but sometimes the keel butted into the sternpost.) In my first effort to figure out the scale of the kit I took a guess at where those points were, and figured the kit must be between 1/150 and 1/165 scale. The more useful measurement that Russ found confirmed that. It looks like the kit is right about on 1/160.
m60a3 - you're being far too generous about what amounted to an exercise in insomnia prevention and a small workout with a calculator. (By the way, a calculator that works in feet, inches, and fractions is a mighty handy thing to have around a modeling workshop - for working out problems of scale, among many other things.)
Here's a plaintive cry in the wilderness: it sure would be nice if the plastic sailing ship kit manufacturers had (a) put their kits on commonly accepted scales, and (b) told the consumers what those scales were. Well, come to think of it, in the early days of the hobby the airplane kit manufacturers didn't always tell us the scales of "fit-the-box" kits either. But exercises like the one we've just been through - trying to figure out the scale of a kit on the basis of information gathered elsewhere - really shouldn't be necessary. And if we can figure out the scales of old kits, the marketing people at Revell, Airfix, etc. ought to be able to do the same thing - or enlist the services of somebody who can.
Actually when I was spouting off in this thread during the wee hours this morning I missed something significant: DD1's reference to the trouble he'd had rigging footropes. I don't remember the exact date of the St. Louis, but she certainly dated from the early seventeenth century. That was, in all probability, too early for footropes.
Dr. R.C. Anderson's The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, 1600-1720 (a superb, low-priced little book that I highly recommend to anybody attempting a ship model of that period) says (pp. 152-153) that the earliest evidence for footropes he found in English sources dates to 1640 - and then only as "horses" on the lower yards. The earliest French reference to footropes he cites dates to 1677, again only on the fore and main lower yards. Dr. Anderson was writing in 1927, but more recent sources say pretty much the same thing. (James Lees's Masting and Rigging of English Ships of War, 1625-1860 says footropes appeared on the lower yards of English ships in about 1675, and on topsail yards about five years later.)
In another thread recently DD1 and others posted some nice contemporary illustrations of the St. Louis and other French ships of the period. None of those pictures shows footropes.
Several full-size modern replicas of seventeenth-century do have footropes - as a safety feature for the benefit of the modern human beings who operate the ships. But it appears that, in the early and mid-seventeenth century, the sailors simply crawled out along the yards, hanging on for dear life. (Several of the famous pictures by the Van de Veldes show people doing just that. One wonders how the evolution of sailing ship rigging might have been different if navies and shipowners had had to worry about insurance companies.) The seventeenth-century system of bundling up the topsails against the heels of the topmasts, rather than furling them along the length of the yards, made it possible to do most of the job of furling in the top, rather than making men crawl out on the yards.
There are plenty of challenges in rigging a seventeenth-century model, but when it comes to footropes the modeler gets a break. It's perfectly accurate to leave 'em off.