I can help a little, but not much. I bought one of these kits and reviewed it for
Scale Models (the British magazine), but that was about 25 years ago and I can't recall having seen it since. So take the following with a big grain of salt.
My recollection is that it was a basically sound, well-detailed kit with a few problems. The biggest, perhaps, was the lack of camber in the decks. They were, as I remember, perfectly flat; they should be arched up slightly but noticeably in the middle. Deck camber is a fundamental, nearly-universal feature of wood ship construction, and Heller, for a long time, didn't understand it. If memory serves, their big H.M.S.
Victory was the first of their major sailing ships to have camber in its decks.
The other major problem with
Le Superbe, as I recall, was the "wood grain" detailing on the hull. It was very well done - if you're willing to believe that the entire hull was hacked out of one enormous tree. There was, as I recall, no indication of individual planks.
I think I also recall a goof in the gun carriages. As I remember, their sides were parallel. They should, of course, be wider at the rear than at the front, so the sides are parallel not to each other but to the tapered gun barrel. That one could be fixed by cutting the carriages up and gluing them together again, I guess - for the relatively few that would be visible on the finished model.
I also remember commenting on the instruction manual, which was a hopeless, inarticulate mess - especially with regard to the rigging. The Heller operation in those days (the late seventies) seems to have included some extraordinarily talented artisans who knew scarcely anything about ships. Those rigging diagrams weren't just simplified or inaccurate; they were downright irrational.
Otherwise ("...but other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?") I remember it as a decent, well-detailed kit. The designers got lots of things right. The "carved" decorations, as usual in a Heller kit, were excellent, and in general the detail was pretty good. I specifically remember the little raised triangles on the decks between the guns. Those are characteristically French shot garlands. Heller left out the cannonballs, but they're easy to make.
Here's a trick for making scale cannonballs. It requires some brass wire, a fireproof surface (such as the "soldering pad" sold by MicroMark), a small ruler, and a small soldering torch (butane, micronox, or whatever). Chop off some identical lengths - say, 1/16" to start with - of the wire, lay them on the soldering pad, and hit them with the torch. In a few seconds each bit of wire will coagulate into a perfect sphere. You'll have to determine the precise length (which, of course, will also be determined by the diameter of the wire) by trial and error, but once you establish that you can fill all those shot garlands in fifteen minutes.
Some good sources of information about this sort of ship are available - and unless Heller has changed that instruction book, you'll need them. The Musee de la Marine in Paris publishes a series of plans for historic French warships, including
Le Superbe. They're available in the U.S. from Taubman Plans Service ( www.taubmansonline.com ). The best source on French 74-gun ships of the line, though, is a magnificent series of four bookd collectively titled
Le Vaisseau de 74 Canons, by Jean Boudriot - one of the finest researchers and draftsmen of the twentieth century. The four volumes together illustrate and describe every conceivable part of such a ship. The two pieces of bad news are that they are (a) out of print, and (b) expensive. (There's an English translation by David Roberts, titled
The Seventy-Four-Gun Ship, but it's even more expensive.) If you're within range of a good library, though, they're worth looking for. Not many libraries have them, but the Interlibrary Loan Service probably could get them.
This has gone on too long, as usual. Hope it helps a little.