Heller Soleil Royal masts and yards compared to Royal Louis/Louis XV in Souvenirs de la Marine

Interesting. But the problems with the Heller kit's spar dimensions go beyond the basic measurements.

The big offenders, to my eye at least, are the topmasts. When the spars of a ship are set  up, the first things that go into place are the lower masts. When they're safely located, and the lower shrouds and stays are rigged, the topmasts are hoisted into position. The topmast has to be stood on the deck in front of the lower mast  and hoisted up through the top (the platform at the lower masthead). In French ships of that period (as Heller more-or-less correctly represents), the topropes (the heavy lines used to hoist the topmasts) were left set up all the time. (English ships only seem to have rigged them when the topmasts were being hoisted or lowered.) The toprope starts from an eye under the lower mast cap, runs down through a sheave at the foot of the topmast, then runs back up on the other side and around a big wood sheave in the after part of the cap. (The big hump in the back part of the cap is a characteristically French feature.) Then the line goes down to the deck. The arrangement is repeated on each side of the mast. Haul on the toprope tackle and the topmast goes up. Slack off on the tackle and the topmast comes down. "Striking the topmasts" was a fairly common evolution in bad weather, and whenever some piece of upper rigging needed to be replaced.

The problem with the Heller kit is that the topmasts can't be hoisted or struck, because they're too long. When the lower masts are mounted, the distances between the tops and the decks are shorter than the lengths of the topmasts. I'm not sure whether the lower masts or too short or the topmasts are too long; I strongly suspect the latter. At any rate, the overall assemblage just can't work.

Neither can those big, bulged plastic parts that are supposed to be glued onto either side of the topmast heads, for the topmast crosstrees to rest on. The topmast (except its very foot) has to be small enough to fit through the hole in the lower mast cap, or the topmast can't be removed (or, for that matter, installed).

The spars of a square-rigged ship are built and rigged in such a way that the uppermost ones can all be removed without disturbing the "layer" below. The topgallant masts can be struck without interfering with the topmasts or their rigging, and the topmasts have to be shorter than the lower masts (minus the portion of the lower mast between the keelson and the uppermost weather deck) so the topmasts can be struck.

This is one of the many reasons why I so strongly dislike that kit. You just can't design the spars of a scale ship model without understanding how the prototype works - and the Heller designers clearly didn't. Over the next few years somebody clued them in and for their next big-scale project they picked a ship for which plenty of detailed, reliable drawings and measurements are available. The spars of the 1/100 Victory kit are fine.

Yes i absolutely agree, the masts should to be able to function, especially at this scale, otherwise it looks a bit ridiculous.  Here is a list of differences in length between Heller's "Soleil Royal" and the "Royal Louis"/"Louis XV", in cm for 1;100 scale or m for 1:1 scale.  +ve for longer than Royal Louis and -ve for shorter.  The foremast is too short, the fore topmast too long, for example..

I would have thought that the Heller main topmast was too long by much more than it apparently is, though.  It surprised me.

I stumbled across a website that gave different dimensions for "Soleil Royal" masts and spars. The masts are a bit shorter than "Royal Louis"/"Louis XV", but I haven't found where he got the dimensions from yet.

and the differences between the heller dimensions and these are.   Again in cm for 1:100 +ve numbers are too long, -ve too short.

But I suspect the Heller hull is too shallow, which would push the masts higher than they should be.  And I haven't checked the "overlap" of the masts yet.

I agree about the "bulges" on the masts for the crosstrees, I also think Heller messed up the crosstrees too.

Good day ,

John,

Yes... looking at these compareing tables You made... SR Heller masts and spars need to be completely rebuild to correct sizes...as well  as relevant fittings... had the same idea...but I planned to use dimensions from Louis Quinze model.(roughly)..but Royal Louis plans will suit it as well...

Are You going to make new spars/masts ? or it is just discussion, how it should be?

BRGDS

Kirill

Hi Kirill!

For me, it is just about finding ways to improve the masts for Soleil Royal and share information and ideas.  Hopefully it will be helpful to those who want to improve this area of the kit.  As Prof Tilley says, the Heller masts are not realistic.  Some people will be perfectl happy to build the kit as it is.  It would be noce to get as near the truth as possible, but I don't think there is enough information about the ship to get very far. I would not like to say "this is how it should be", each modeller can make his/her own decision about what they prefer, but  would like to say "this is how it can be".

The Royal Louis/Louis Quinz model quoted is not an ideal source, so if there re other sources of information (perhaps the Royal Louis plans in Denmark) that would be most interesting.

I still haven't decided whether to put masts on my own build when I do it.  I may not, more for practical reasons than personal preference.  But if the information is useful to anyone, then that is great.

Best wishes,

John

Hi John,

I see...actually I didn' "еxplore" box with my SR... but today check your tables more carefully, may be it is ness-ry to make them a little bit shorter, those masts,top and topgallant masts...just in purpose to make them look more realistic...the only fore mast need to be extanded, as I can see... compare to the dimensions You gave for Royal Louis...but I don't know how difficult it could be  and what will be better, to modify Heller masts or make new ones...another my idea was, to rigg this Heller SR model,as dutch vessel...using information of rigging "William Rex "or "7 Provincien"... in such case it coud be just model of the navy vessel with typical continental way of rigging in the day of bowsprit topmast sail...w/o SR name...

You mentioned  Danish plan of Royal Louis ... what is this? where to find them?

Some years ago I was very impressed how this model was built

http://www.dishmodels.ru/gshow.htm?p=6549

...and decided that I want to try to assemble this kit as well... author of this model didn't make to much modification of original kit, even riggs left the same... but when - assembled it looks perfect ! for me... :)))

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As jtilley correctly pointed out, the top masts appear far too high. When I build my SR, I realised that the topmasts looked ridicilously high compared to their diameters. If I sit my Vic beside one wonders even more, as the topmasts have a complete different ratio there.

For the correct size, as far as I know, the diameter and height of the masts and spars were already calculated by the main frame (maitre couple?) and perhaps one can find the calculation in the book of Paris.

XXXDAn

Hi Kirill,

the Danish plan I mentioned are ones of Royal Louis 1692 (?).  This is the body plan, there is also a sail plan of the ship, image found on the internet, I don't remember where.

Perhaps this is the sail plan?  But I am not sure what the dimensions are in.  Feet?  What kind of feet?

 That is a very nice model btw Kirill!

Best wishes,

John.

Hi dafi,

I can remember reading dimensions for different rates of ship ,1st rate and so on, but I think the 1st rates mentoned had fewer guns than Soleil Royal and the dimensions were slightly smaller than for "Royal Louis"/"Louis XV".  I'll have another look to see if I can find anything else in Souvenirs de la Marine.

I was surprised that the measurements for the topmasts of "Royal louis"/"Louis XV"were not that much smaller than the ones for the Heller kit, perhaps the overlap is bigger on "Royal Louis"/"Louis XV", but I'll have to look into it.

Best wishes,

John.

As I was cleaning out my old office a few weeks back I ran across a copy of the old Scale Models magazine containing the review/article about my finished Heller Soleil Royal. The date was sometime in the late 1970s.

The photos in the article supported my oft-expressed dislike of the kit. I'd forgotten, for instance, those ridiculous "bulges" at the topmast heads. (They make the topmasts look like a snake that had swallowed a rat. I fixed that problem on my model - though I honestly don't remember how.)

Imagine what a piece of wood like that would look like if the real ship were built that way. How much would such a chunk of wood weigh?

I like to replace the plastic masts with my own wood dowels that I shape for the purpose, so I never worried about that aspect of the Heller kit. Also, I am impressed with the photos provided by Kirill of a completed Le Soleil Royal. I do have one issue with the otherwise excellent model; the modeler paid no attention to filling that hole in the knee of the head. Otherwise, I am impressed!

Bill

cerberusjf

sure what the dimensions are in. Feet? What kind of feet?

It does not help that the unit of a meter gets established about this time, but before there is an SI to unify the thing

Oh, andto answer Tanker's question from a different thread, the French fathom, l'loise, was used for both land and sea measurements  which found its way into arpents and perche used in both Lousiana and Quebec.

cerberusjf

the Danish plan I mentioned are ones of Royal Louis 1692 (?).  This is the body plan, there is also a sail plan of the ship, image found on the internet, I don't remember where.

You can find a good selection of plans from the Danish Archives on www.orlogsbasen.dk. It's searchable by various criteria. Obviously most of the plans are of Danish ships (the bulk of it is from 1690 onwards), but there are some foreign ones like this that the Danish Navy got hold of to keep an eye on developments abroad. If you take the time to browse around the site you can find a number of detail plans of stuff like masts, yards, internal bulkheads, framing arrangements etc. showing information that is very difficult to find elsewhere. If something takes your fancy you can order copies of the plan in question from Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives - at a price of course. Most plans are in 1:48 scale.

And... that three-decker's rigging plan shows an old-fashioned bowsprit+spritsail topmast arrangement combined with two large jibs. Now _that_ is something you don't see every day!

cerberusjf

 

Perhaps this is the sail plan?  But I am not sure what the dimensions are in.  Feet?  What kind of feet?

Hmm... the legend is in Danish, so Danish feet ( 1" = 2.56 cm) are a candidate. Essentially there are three columns in the tables, the first is "length" ("Lang") in feet, the middle is "something" ("Diameter" or "Circumference" would be a guess, from context) in inches, the third is "something something" ("Tip og nok"? "<length of> Yardarms and mastheads", in that case) in feet and inches. The left table is masts, the right table is yards. 

The left-hand table contains
Main mast
Fore mast
Bowsprit
Mizzen mast
Main topmast
Fore topmast
Mizzen topmast
Spritsail topmast
Main topgallant mast
Fore topgallant mast
Flag pole
<undecipherable>. Spritsail topsail flagpole, maybe?

The right-hand table contains
Main yard
Fore yard
Spritsail yard
Mizen yard (the lateen)
Crossjack yard
Main topsail yard
Fore topsail yard
Mizen topsail yard
Spritsail topsail yard
Main topgallant yard
Fore topgallant yard

An interesting rig, that, with a large number of transitional features. Full lateen mizen sail with a topmast staylsail, but no lower mizzen staysail (unlike the Heller Roleil Royal if i rembember correctly from way back when I built it), a full set of main staysails proper but not yet a middle staysail, and two jibs but no jib-boom and no fore staysail, an old-style spritsail topsail on its mast. No leesails. Rather long lower and topsail yards, too. Squatter in overall appearance than Heller's rig.

Thanks very much for the translation, it was very useful!  I quite like this sail plan, it is squatter than the Heller kit, which I think makes it look less top-heavy.  I'll have to spend some time digging in the Danish archives to see if I can find out whther it is the Royal Louis plan or not.

Thanks again!

John.

There _is_ a Royal Louis sail/rig plan in the Rigsarkivet, listed on the Orlogsbasen website, but unfortunately it is one of the many that was not scanned. I think they had a time-limited project to set up the site to expose the Rigsarkivet content online and stopped work when the money ran out.

http://www.orlogsbasen.dk/enkel.htm

Enter "Royal Louis" in the search box, click the "Søg" ("Search") button, click the "Vis" ("Show") button on the only hit in the resulting hit list. You get a list of available plans for the ship. Google Translate is your friend, it is in Danish only. Use the translate plugin if you are running Chrome, it is a godsend in such cases!

The only scan available is the lines and body plan. "Dimensioner af Master, Rundholter og Seigl, til det Frandske Orloug Skib Royal Louis" is the one you want, near the bottom of the list.

Thanks very much again Staale, I found the sail plan and as you say, it's not been scanned unfortunately.  Digging around, I found some other plans that are very interesting, so thanks very much for that. 

I converted the danish plans from Danish feet to m, so they can read as cm to compare with Heller's 1:100 model (I didn't do the diameter).  The masts o the Danish plan are quite a bit shorter.  I also corrected the name of the mizzen sailyard to the crossjack and the lateen to mizzen.  Again, + means the Heller parts are longer, -ve means they are shorter

I found a website with this sail plan.  It confirms that it is "Royal Louis" and comes from this site, a very reliable source.

http://gerard.delacroix.pagesperso-orange.fr/royal/royal.htm

Thanks again for all your help.

I checked the main topmast crosstree and compared it to the "Louis XV" in Souvenirs de la marine plan and it appears to be a completely different shape.  On the Heller model, both mast fit into the forwad hole and the whole trestle tree extends much further aft.  The Louis XV drawing by contrast, extends much further forward. Differences can be seen here:-

Also, the main top is much smaller than the Louis XV plans in souvenirs de la marine.  The Heller kit's main top is 5.6cm dia, the Louis XV plan is 7.0cm diameter.

Likewise the fore top, the Heller part is 5.1cm, the Louis XV plan is 6.2cm.

Further evidence that the Heller designers just didn't know what they were doing. Most of the proportions in that kit's rigging are messed up one way or another.

I've given my (mostly negative) opinions of that kit in several other threads, so I won't repeat them now. Suffice to say that if, when I bought the thing (almost forty years ago), I'd known what I know now, I never would have bought it.

Quite a few other folks seem to enjoy it enormously, and it's not for me to tell them they shouldn't. But it sure would be nice if some manufacturer would produce a large-scale, heavily-decorated seventeenth-century warship that would build into a genuine scale model.

I confess, I did build her too, and I enjoyed :-)

As long as one accepts for not taking her as historically correct one can have fun with this gilted mavel. If not, skip everything but the decoration and go scratch, based on the blanc contemporary models from the marine museum.

XXXDan

I'm certainly not saying there's anything wrong wiht building it out of the box.  I'm not that concerned about absolute accuracy as sources can give different answers, but I would like to improve what is obviously wrong.   I don't think the Heller crosstree is correct, but I'm not syre if the Sovenir de la Marine plan is correct either.  Boudriot's crosstrees are a different shape altogether.  Not much can be done about the underwater hull(other than replacing the hull or making it waterline), but I thought something could be done about the masts and yards.  I felt that there was something disproportionate in the dimensions of Heller's masts, particularly the topmasts, the shrouds seemed to be too steep to my eye and the topgallant too shallow.  And as the masts needed replacing with stronger material, I thought that I would try to find out more accurate, or rather more proportionate dimensions for their replacements.

On this site, you can see how much taller the masts on Soleil Royal are compared to Victory.  The models have been lined up with their waterlines level with eachother.  The masts on Soleil Royal are much taller..

modellboard.net/index.php?topic=24892.30

modellboard.net/index.php?topic=24892.30

Looking at the depth in the hold, I would measure the draft of the Heller kit at about 5cm, up to the lower wale, (4.5 cm for the waterline marked at the hull midpoint), so the depth of the hold would be about 0.5cm less than this.  The depth of hold for the Soleil Royal according to http://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=1917 was 6.8m and 7.5m for "Royal Louis" 1692, so to correct the lengths of the lower masts for the shrunken underwater hull, about 2.5 -3 cm would need to be removed.

Very nice model btw dafi!

Interesting discussion :-)

As for the crosstrees, I see the difference to the drawing, but do not find it too bad, as the system with the round front was respected (as opposed to the english lacking this bow). Paris also was basing this on his own research and I do not really know his sources and how they should be judged today. What does Andersson say in his book, which also is a marvellous reference? Does he give a hint about the ratio of the masts?

And do not forget, there was not such a strong regulations about how to do thing and each yard did build differently. And we do have NO real evidence about the appearence of the SR but comparisons of Colbert, the model of the RL and some other contemporary drawings and models. Boudriot is far too modern imho.

Apart from being far too long I think the stability (or better non stability of the suplied top mast) is a main recommendation for exchanging the topmast.

To keep modifications to a reasonable size, I personally would take over the lower masts including the fighting tops and just replace the upper parts.

And as jtilley mentioned before, the whole ensemble of mast-topmast-topgallant/royal mast is a like a teleskope. If the topmast is standing on the deck, its height should go just underneath the main crosstrees, and the topgallant mast from the fighting top to the (now new positioned) top mast cross trees and so on.

And like this the horridly thick flag poles could be replaced too :-)

XXXDAn

PS: @cerberusjf 

Thank you, but that was just the mercy of a well chosen perspective ;-)

It seems I've been on a wild goose chase.  I looked through Jean Boudriot's book "Les vaisseaux de 74 a 120 canons" nd came across the Danish plan of Royal Louis.  He said the feet were French and when I converted them to metric, they came out almost identically to the PAris measurements.  So Paris must have used the plan for a source rather than the model.

I also spotted an error with my measurement of the crossjack, I measured the wrong part.  It should be 19.8cm

I went through Anderson and found that the main trestle trees should be just less than 1/3 of the beam of the ship.  The Beam of the Soleil Royal is 14.3318 m, which gives a maximum of 4.8 m long.  The main top is probably correct for Soleil Royal after all!

I couldn't find information on topmast trestle trees for French ships, but on Dutch ships they were half the size of the trestle trees on the lower mast.  If the French followed the same practice, the main topmast trestle trees would be 2.4 cm long and cross trees slightly less than that. 

The kit's main topmast trestle trees are 4.5 cm long and  the cross trees 5.0 cm long, so they are probably too big.  They are also not balanced as both masts pass through the forward hole, so much more of the trestle trees extends aft.

On this image from "Album de Colbert" for example,  if you compare the main mast trestle trees with the main topmast trestle trees, the topmast trestle trees look about 1/2 the main mast ones, which is in line with the description of Dutch  practice.

As far as I know, Paris' dawings are taken from the model of "Royal Louis"/"Louis XV"

I also went through Anderson's book to see what he said about mast and yard lengths.  Again lengths in cm for 1:100 and m for 1:1, +ve difference means Heller's part is too long, -ve means it's too short.  There's not as big a difference as I was expecting

As I say, there are a variety of formulae in Anderson, so the values I've posted are not difinitive in any way, they're only a guide.

The mizzen is missing form my calculations from Anderson because the height of the mizzen depends on where the mast is stepped and where the tops of the other masts are, so its height can't be calculated only from the breadth of the hull or its relation to the other masts.