I haven't built the kit and don't have one in my possession any more, but I did get one sent to me for review by a magazine,
Model Shipwright, when the kit was originally released (that's quite a while ago). The following comments are based on looking up that review.
The kit does have deck camber. In fact I commented in my review that "with this kit Heller has at last discovered deck camber, and has provided a series of deck beams to make sure the camber is correct." The only problem involving camber concerns the skylight on the poop deck - which should have camber and doesn't. That's a particularly vexing difficulty because the skylight is molded in clear plastic.
The question of the entry ports is an interesting one for which I don't have a definitive answer. The ship now has ornate entry ports in both sides; every visitor is bound to remember them. The Heller kit doesn't have them.
The entry ports appear on every set of plans I've seen - including the ones by George Campbell and Basil Lavis, those in R.W. Bugler's
H.M.S. Victory, and the most recent version, the superb set of drawings by John McKay in his
Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-gun Ship Victory. But there's evidence to support Heller. Another recent book,
H.M.S. Victory: Construction, Restoration, and Repair (I may have garbled the title a little), by John McKay and Alec McGowan, contains reproductions of several contemporary (i.e., eighteenth- and ninteenth-century) paintings of the ship. Not a single one of them shows the entry ports. That includes the enormous oil painting by J.M.W. Turner, which was commissioned by the Prince Regent and is a major attraction at the National Maritime Museum. Turner is known to have gone on board the ship and made scketches for the painting. (On the other hand, he didn't finish the painting till 1822 - and it's of course quite possible that the ship was modified during the interim.) Heller seems to have followed the Turner painting. I'm not prepared to say the kit's treatment of the entry ports is incorrect.
One area in which I think it probably - but not necessarily - is wrong is in the height of the forecastle bulwarks. Those in the kit are about knee-high, as are the ones on the actual ship today. Dr. R.C. Anderson, who was involved in the
Victory's restoration during the 1920s, said in print that he thought that was a mistake - for which he took the blame. Bugler, who was doing research on the ship's history at the same time the restoration was taking place, concluded that during her 1802 refit the bulwarks were raised to shoulder height. The restoration committee found that out after the carpenters had finished the low bulwarks, which the committee understandably didn't want to scrap at that point.
At the moment some extremely high-powered research into the
Victory's 1805 configuration is taking place, as the ship is prepared for the celebrations commemorating the bicentennial of the battle this coming October. As I understand it, the researchers aren't convinced one way or the other about the forecastle bulwarks. They've raised some interesting questions about the decorations on the transom; apparently there's some doubt as to whether the Prince of Wales's feathers were installed before or after the battle. I suspect this project will reveal some extremely interesting and surprising details. But so far, at least in the materials I happen to have encountered, the researchers have said nothing one way or the other about the entry ports.
In general, I share the widely-held view that this is one of the best sailing ship kits the plastic industry has ever produced. It does have some problems, though. The steering wheels are crude for the scale, and somebody on Heller's design staff apparently thought belaying pins had sharp points. There's virtually no detail inside the ship's boats. In my opinion the elaborate mechanisms and jigs for rigging the deadeyes, lanyards, shrouds, and ratlines are a waste of plastic - and effort. And some parts of such a ship just can't be reproduced well in injection-molded plastic. (Those hammock netting stanchions have got to go, as do the blocks and deadeyes. A rigid mold can't produce a block or deadeye with a groove around it
and holes through it.) Even sillier is the absence of parrals for the yards. The kit provides no means of attaching the yards to the masts. (Apparently they're just supposed to hang there.) The vacuum-formed "sails" need to be consigned to the garbage before the kit leaves the hobby shop. There is, as I recall, a little bit of awkwardness in the shape of the hull under the counter (fairly easy to fix). And the one I had, at least, was molded in an assortment of colors that made no sense. (A bright red rudder?) But a competent modeler could fix all those things.
One small point that a lot of people seem to miss. The yellow-ochre stripes on the
Victory's sides have a complex and subtle shape. They don't exactly follow the lines of the gunports or the decks; they taper gradually at both ends. Heller, to its credit, molded a series of extremely fine raised lines that accurately indicate where the yellow and black should meet. I've seen quite a few pictures of models whose builders ignored those lines, with damaging results to the appearance of the finished products.
I'd offer one other suggestion. Unless Heller has revised it, the instruction manual is a disaster. The English version is downright scandalous; it seems to have been "translated" by somebody who neither understood French nor had attempted to build the model. ("Le mat de misaine" is not the mizzen mast. It's the foremast. The mizzen mast is "le mat d'artimon.") In the original French version the designers insisted on trying to describe the rigging (which, I suspect, they didn't really understand) with a series of incredibly complex diagrams keyed to numbers that make the whole thing about twice as complicated as it needs to be. Anybody investing time and money in this kit should spend a little more and buy either the McKay or McKay/McGowan book mentioned above - or C. Nepean Longridge's
The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships. Any of those works will provide a good, understandable description of the ship's rigging - along with much else.
Hope this helps a little. It's a great kit - but
definitely not a weekend project.