Frank, you're absolutely right. We've discussed this kit several times here in the Forum. To save repetition, here's what I said back in 2010:
"I can't argue about the Phenix kit. It apparently was based on a reliable set of plans, and can reasonably be called a scale model - with allowances for the technical limitations that go along with its age.
"The 'Sirene' is another matter. We've established pretty firmly in other threads that no such ship ever existed - and I question whether it could have. The structure of the stern is ridiculously top-heavy; I'm not at all sure a real ship that looked like that would float. And imagine what that figurehead would actually look like, full-size. (For that matter - imagine the chunk of wood that it would have to have been carved from. A California redwood, maybe?) There's just no way that kit qualifies as a scale model.
"The big problem with Heller's sailing ship line was always that the people responsible for designing the kits were superb artisans whose knowledge of the prototypes was less than thorough. The "carved" detail on the best Heller kits is superb; it can stand comparison with the carvings on all but the very best of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English "board room" models. (That's the highest compliment I know how to pay to such things.) But in terms of historical accuracy, Heller sailing ship kits range from ok to hideous. We've gone over several of the worst offenders (the "Drakkar Oseberg" and the Soleil Royal, for instance) elsewhere in this Forum; there's no point in bringing them up again. In general the company got better as the years went by, and by the late 1970s its products certainly deserved to be taken seriously as scale models. But almost all of them continued to suffer from irritating, if repairable, non-nautical characteristics. (The 1/100 Victory, which I, like many other modelers, regard as one of the finest plastic kits ever, offers no means of fastening the yards to the masts. And some of its belaying pins have sharp points, and its boats are undetailed, hollow shells. The 1/150 74-gun ships have flat decks, and the "wood grain" detail on their hulls imply that each of them was hacked bodily from a single tree. The big German steel barques, Pamir and Passat, have "jackstay eyebolts" on the fronts of their yards instead of the tops. And so forth.)....
For the sake of fairness, here's a reply I got:
"Re the Heller Sirene. This ship actually existed. Go to Model Warships.com. Go to home page, then Gallery. Click on "small ships" then go to year 2008. Run the category until you see the model, made by Mario Grima. According to Mr. Grima, this ship took part in the batle of La Hogue in 1692, but was destroyed with some other French ships.
"To criticize Heller and other makes is a moot point. Yes, their models do run hot and cold. This may be off, that might not be off, etc, etc, etc. What really matters here is the fact that these models actually do exist. Ship modelers-especially those of us who build sailing ships are considered "minority modelers". The kit manufacturers know the market, thats why planes, armor and fantasy and science fiction subjects are so popular. It takes time to build a ship model right.
"I think the last sailing ship model Airfix released was the Vasa., but this was in the early 70s. Since the ship does exist, Airfix was able to produce it by studying it in the Stockholm Museum where it now resides. I think it is an excellent kit , but when I built it, I eschewed the vac-form sails and made furled sails out of tissue paper. Wish I knew how to upload photos to this sight so you can see it.
"Wooden ship models in kit form have been around since the early 1920s, but these were crude by anybodys standards. Some model kits of this ere did not even have roughly shaped hulls-you got a piece of balsa wood and you were on your own.
"The hobby has come a long way since then. Maybe what is out there is not perfect, but we, as modelers should not be put off by this. I find the most pleasurable aspect of the hobby is the enjoyment of building. When I build a model, I don't care if it wins a prize or not. If people like my work, all the better. One of my clubs used to hav e a show at South St. Seaport in NYC. It was the first Saturday and Sunday in August.The part I enjoyed most was when visitors would ask me about my work and compliment my craftsmanship. They always wanted to take photos of my display and I would oblige them. This is what modeling is all about. Take care."
And here's my reply to that post:
"There's an old saying among academics that "the absence of proof is not the same as the proof of absence - and the proof of absence is difficult to establish." I can't prove that no French sailing warship named "La Sirene" ever existed.
"I did, however, look up the Battle of La Hogue on several websites. (Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_La_Hogue_(1692) Later edit: for some reason the "copy" function on my computer has trouble with the parentheses in that web address. If you click on the link you're liable to get a message from Wikipedia telling you that no such article exists, and asking you "did you mean Action at La Hogue (1692). Click on that and the article will come up). It's pretty clear that no French ship of the line named "Sirene" was present at that action. And a few minutes' surfing on "La Sirene (ship)" produced nothing. (Searching on "Sirene" did make me aware of some nice, unbelievably expensive restaurants, though.)
"The baroque period in warship design was indeed characterized - especially in France - by extravagantly ornate decorative carvings. But another characteristic of the period was a concern for proportion and scale (in the aesthetic sense). Naval architects did not simply slap additional piles of decks onto the sterns of existing designs - as it certainly looks like the Heller people did when they designed that kit. And there's just no way that a figurehead like that existed - or could have existed.
"'I'm certainly sympathetic to the view that, since the number of plastic sailing ship kits on the market is so small, modelers ought to be grateful for what they've got - and prepared to make the best of it. But that doesn't excuse the manufacturers from producing kits that are...well, far inferior in terms of accuracy to the aircraft, car, armor, and modern warship kits they were making at the same time.
"I'll say again what I've said many times in this Forum. I don't suggest that anybody refrain from buying or building a kit because I don't like it. This is (for most of us) a hobby, and what matters most is what we enjoy. But I do take exception to manufacturers' promoting as scale models kits that, by any reasonable definition, are no such thing. That's deceptive advertising, and purchasers are entitled to know up front that what they're buying is...well, something other than a scale model kit…."
And (if you aren't thoroughly bored with all this by now) here's a later post I wrote for the same thread:
"Squadron mail order is now advertising the old Heller Sirene (for a ridiculous price - though I admit I've seen worse). Apparently Heller has risen from the ashes of bankruptcy and is in genuine production again.
"Here's the link to the ad: http://www.squadron.com/ItemDetails.asp?item=HR52907 .
"One very interesting thing about that Squadron ad. It includes a copy of what I presume to be the box art. There's also a button labeled "additional view." Click on that button and you get a photograph of the model - which looks nothing like the box art. (Compare the stern ornamentation, the figureheads, and the overall sheer of the hull. In the painting, the sterncastle structure rises naturally out of the shape of the hull - and the figurehead is of such a size that it could have been carved from a real log.) It looks like the artist who painted the picture (in contrast to the people who designed the kit) knew what a seventeenth-century French warship actually looked like.
"Equally interestingly, the verbal description of the (supposed) actual ship is different from what Heller's said about it in the kit's earlier incarnations. (The one in the Minicraft box that I bought thirty or forty years ago had a blurb on the side of the box relating some utter nonsense about the ship having been sunk in a West Indies hurricane. And the "ship" seems to have acquired a new "history" every time the kit's been reissued.) This time the description is so generalized that it's hard to argue with.
"On the one hand, it's good to see that somebody in the Heller stable has, it seems, learned what sailing ships look like. On the other, this new packaging appears to be even more deceptive than the old.
"That Heller has come back to life is certainly good news. (The same "new release" page on the Squadron website announces the return of the big galley Reale, which is on my personal shortlist of "best sailing ship kits ever.") But I continue to think that stunts of the "Sirene" type do no good for the hobby - and constitute consumer fraud."
This thing just isn't a scale model. As you can tell, this kind of stunt by model kit manufacturers really bugs me.