My strange, highly selective memory (which has no trouble recalling details of models I worked on forty years ago, but can't handle the names of people who were introduced to me last week) is trolling up some points about some of those old Model Shipways kits that may be of some slight interest.
I'd be interested to know what kind of wood the hulls in Bill's kits are made of. For many years the standard Model Shipways hull was made of white pine, with Philippine mahogany available as an extra-cost option. The "carving" was done under contract by a furniture company, on a lathe. That process left a big, round spindle at each end of the hull. A visitor to the Model Shipways plant (which was located behind a little storefront on a dead-end street in Bogota, New Jersey) would usually see a couple of nice ladies sitting at a table chiseling the spindles off hulls.
Pine is a nice wood for many purposes, but modelers complained that its tendency to secrete juices was dangerous to paint jobs. The nice pine that MS was using also rose in price over the years. Sometime in (I think) the seventies, the company started switching over to "white wood," a species of, I believe, the poplar family. It's considerably harder than pine, with a quite close grain; the heartwood sometimes has a slightly greenish cast. Eventually (I don't know exactly when) MS switched over to basswood - arguably the best of the four.
I believe the Essex and Flying Fish were part of the company line from the time of its founding, or nearly so. (That was shortly after WWII.) The plans for both, as I remember, were drawn by a gentleman name H.S. Scott (I hope I haven't botched his name), and were among the best in the ship model kit world. (MS has always had a reputation for producing some of the best plans in the business.) The Rattlesnake came much later - in the sixties I think.
I don't know much about the Mayflower except that it was based on the reconstruction by R.C. Anderson. Dr. Anderson, of course, was one of the great ones. His interpretation of the Mayflower was quite a bit different than that of William Baker, who designed the full-size replica Mayflower II (which is still on public display at Plymouth). I'm pretty sure the MS kit predates the Baker reconstruction (i.e., the mid-fifties). Some knowledgeable people like the Anderson version better. In any case, the evidence about the real ship is so scanty that neither reconstruction can really be proven "right" or "wrong."
As originally issued, the solid, machine-carved hulls of the Essex and Rattlesnake were made with the quarterdecks and forecastles carved in place. That meant that the guns under those decks took the form of "dummies" - stub barrels that were to be plugged into holes that the modeler drilled in the middle of the "ports," which were shallow, recessed squares chiseled into the wood at the appropriate spots. (I remember building the Rattlesnake in that form; I never built the Essex.) It sticks in my silly memory that, shortly before the company's original owners, John Shedd and Sam Milone, retired and sold the firm to Model Expo, they revised the Essex and Rattlesnake hulls so they were "hollowed out" down to the level of the main decks. (I think that change, like the replacement of lead with britannia metal, was largely a bow to the increased competition from Bluejacket and other companies - including the plastic kit manufacturers.) My memory may be completely bogus about this point. But if your Essex and/or Rattlesnake hull is cut away to the level of the main deck, you've certainly got a relatively recent kit.
The Flying Fish was a slightly controversial subject for a while. Sometime in (I think) the late seventies or very early eighties, MS commissioned Ben Lankford to do a complete revision of the plans. (The old Scott version wasn't bad by any means, but MS in those days was the kind of company that was always trying to improve its products.) Mr. Lankford produced a set of extremely detailed drawings and a new, much more detailed instruction book. He also wrote a series of articles for the Nautical Research Journal about the project. (I can look up the date on the Journal's CD-ROM set if anybody's interested.) The plans - specifically the sail plan - promptly came under fire from several directions - including a nasty letter to the NRJ from no less than Donald McNarry. It seems that Mr. Lankford - like Mr. Scott before him - had made a fundamental goof in working out the dimensions of the yards. He'd worked from a contemporary table of spar dimensions, which, for each yard, listed the length, diameter, and "yardarm length." (Newcomers to the hobby sometimes assume that "yard" and "yardarm" mean the same thing. They don't. The yardarm is the outboard extremity of the yard - the section outboard of the yardarm cleats, where the earring of the sail and various pieces of rigging are secured. Each yard has two yardarms, port and starboard.) Messrs. Lankford and Scott had assumed that the "yardarm length" was supposed to be added to the length of the yard; in fact it was supposed to be subtracted. In other words, all the yards in the Scott and, now, Lankford sail plans were significantly too long.
It says a great deal about Mr. Lankford and Model Shipways that they reacted to that revelation by revising the plans. But there was nothing they could do about the copies that had already been sold. So three sets of Model Shipways plans for the Flying Fish are knocking around out there: the original Scott version (with incorrect yard lengths), the first Lankford version (ditto), and the revised Lankford version (corrected).
The good news is that Model Expo sells copies of the revised Lankford plans: http://www.modelexpo-online.com/product.asp?ITEMNO=MSPL2018 . (The Model Shipways Flying Fish that's currently on the market is a plank-on-bulkhead kit, but I don't think the plans have been changed significantly since Mr. Lankford's second effort; if they have, I'm sure it's only been to make them more accurate in some way.) They aren't exactly cheap (paying $70 for plans to build a kit that cost a dollar does seem a little weird), but they're certainly worth thinking about.
I remember one other little snippet about the Rattlesnake. That set of plans was drawn by none other than George Campbell, who worked from an "Admiralty draught" that was made in England after the ship was captured. The sail plan and rigging, of course, are almost entirely reconstructed by Mr. Campbell. (I don't know whether a contemporary set of spar dimensions exists or not.) In most respects the drawings are typical Campbell (i.e., excellent). But he did make one mistake of omission: he left off the headsails. There's no indication anywhere on the plans of a jib, fore topmast staysail, fore staysail, or any other fore-and-aft sail other than the driver. When I was working on mine (that must have been in the early seventies) I sent a letter to MS inquiring about that point. I got back a nice letter acknowledging that the plans were simply wrong; that the Rattlesnake ought to have at least a fore topmast staysail and one jib.
Those are the things my poor, strange old brain can recall at the moment. Heaven only knows what it will dredge up tomorrow. But I hope the above is of at least a little use to somebody.