Through the fantastic generosity and courtesy of our good friend Bill Morrison, my Prince and Sovereign of the Seas arrived yesterday. Bill, I can't thank you enough.
So now I can comment a little more intelligently on those two kits.
These two in particular are from a relatively recent issue, still with the factory plastic around them, with "Special Edition" on the boxes. Also with modern, cryptic instruction sheets, rather than the well-written (but English only) original ones that identified all the parts and explained the assembly process verbally. I think these kits date from the period (early eighties, I think) when Heller and Airfix were owned by the same consortium in France.
The Sovereign of the Seas is a much older model. That shows in the slightly less sharp "carved" details, and (maybe most obviously) in the lack of detail inside the bulwarks. But the basis for a serious scale model is certainly there.
The Prince is one of the nicest plastic sailing ships I've ever seen. The biggest problem with this particular example is severe warping in the deck piece. Airfix generally made all the decks of a sailing ship in one piece, from bow to stern, with vertical slabs of plastic forming the various deck levels. Those slabs are to be covered up with beautifully-rendered bulkhead pieces. I'm thinking it may be easier to saw all the decks apart and fit them individually. Or replace them with wood.
Oddly, there are no coamings (raised rims) around the hatches. And I'm not sure what that big, oblong shape running down the middle of the maindeck represents. (A long row of gratings? Hatch boards?) Maybe I can find photos of the Navy Board model to clear that up. Slightly later edit: I found such a photo: http://www.modelships.de/HMS_Prince_I/Science_Museum_IMG_0596.jpg . The Navy Board style of omitting planking makes it a little sketchy, but it looks to me like the space along the centerline between the capstan and the main mast bitts was open to the next deck down, with just a few beams crossing it. That replacement wood deck idea sounds better and better.)
The deadeyes, lanyards, and chain platforms, and chain plates are molded integrally with each other - one piece for each mast on each side. Airfix took a different approach to the deadeyes than usual. Each upper deadeye has a small hole drilled right through the middle. The modeler is supposed to run the shroud (produced on the "rigging loom," which went into the trash along with the vac-formed "sails") through the hole. Easy, if not particularly convincing. (The shroud is supposed to go around the upper deadeye, and the last few feet of the shroud are supposed to be seized back on the shroud itself.) Not an unreasonable compromise, given the intended purchasers and the limitations of injection molding. I've thought of several ways to make the bottoms of the shrouds look more convincing - though rigging individual deadeye lanyards on that scale is beyond my capacity. (I might have been able to do it once, but my post-middle-aged eyesight rules it out nowadays. Besides, I'm itching to build quite a few models in the years I have left.)
Airfix packaged various kinds of thread with its ships over the years. The stuff in both these kits is awful - an apparently synthetic white thread with a slick, shiny, rather wispy appearance. It's nowhere near big enough for the lower standing rigging. It's going in the trash.
The kit does indeed offer the option of mounting the topsail and topgallant yards in different positions. But the upper positions are too low. The topsail yards should be raised right up to a few feet below the topmast crosstrees, and the topgallant yards to those tiny crosstrees that support the flagpoles. Yeah, those topsails and topgallants were enormous pieces of canvas.
I don't care for Airfix's approach to lower deck guns - "dummy" barrels that plug into holes in the middle of recessed squares in the hull halves. To fix this on a three-decked ship would take an enormous amount of work. On the other hand, the port lids are beautifully done, and the recesses for the "dummies" are deeper than those of the Sovereign of the Seas kit. And it's worth noting that the old Board Room models scarcely ever have guns at all. I may end up building this kit with the gunports shut.
The molding of the windows and lanterns is exquisite. Maybe it's also worth noting that the big, 1/48 scale Board Room model of the Prince in the Science Museum shows all the glass parts as flat, black-painted pieces of wood, with gold dots to represent the intersections of the frame pieces. (It also doesn't have any guns.) In this, and several other respects, the Airfix kit is simply more detailed than the Navy Board model.
The rigging and painting instructions are pretty weak. (The originals may have been better.) But - unlike those of many other kits - the rigging diagram isn't exactly inaccurate; it's just very, very simplified. I'm sure many purchasers would be quite happy with it.
The flags are beautifully printed. But they have a feature that I've never been able to understand. Why do kit manufacturers insist on making flags with "wrinkles" drawn in perspective? This set isn't as bad as some (the most egregious example is the old Revell Santa Maria), but why do such a thing at all? It surely would be easier for the designers to draw the flags flattened out, and anybody with enough dexterity to build a model (or put on his own clothes) surely can put genuine, three-dimensional wrinkles and waves in a flag in a few seconds. One of Tilley's minor pet peeves.
Overall, it's a fine kit. It will be a beautiful model built carefully straight from the box, and with a little extra effort it can be turned into a show-stopper. Thanks again, Bill! I hope my deteriorating skills and eyesight can do it justice.