Seasick - One of your wishes has already been granted. The British firm Skytrex makes a series of 1/700 sailing warship kits in white metal, including the
Constitution.
I don't have the kit, but I do have the Skytrex H.M.S.
Victory. It's a remarkable little piece of merchandise. The one-piece hull casting is excellent, and thoroughly researched. (It is, to my knowledge, the only
Victory kit on the market that gets the forecastle bulwarks right.) There are separate castings for the poop deck, the beams in the waist, the anchors, and the ship's boats. A meticulous paint job would turn this thing into a masterpiece.
Some of the other components of the kit are a little more problematic. The masts and yards are also cast in white metal. They're ok in terms of size, but extremely flexible. Wood or brass would be better. The kit also comes with a sheet of photo-etched brass parts. These include the shrouds and ratlines (good idea, but a little too coarse for the scale) and most of the sails. (The fore and main courses are furled, and are cast with their yards. The topsails, topgallants, headsails, and spanker are photo-etched brass.) Skytrex's biggest market, I gather, is the wargame community, and those brass sails are clearly designed to be sturdy enough to survive on the game table. They aren't bad looking; they have reef points etched in relief. But there's just no way a brass sail can be treated to make it translucent, which a sail ought to be. My intention, if I ever get up the nerve to build the thing, is to replace the masts and yards with wood and the sails with paper.
The instructions include a rigging diagram, but it's pretty simplified. For most modelers, though, I suspect it will be plenty detailed enough. We're talking about a hull length of four inches.
The Skytrex range is worth a serious look. It covers British, French, Spanish, and American ships - including the only U.S.S.
Chesapeake kit I've ever heard of. The website is www.skytrex.com . From the home page, click on "Navy World of Models," then on "Meridian Trafalgar Series." The site includes an online sample of an instruction sheet.
Oh - my wish list includes ANY sailing ship, in ANY scale, from ANY good manufacturer. Apart from a couple that Trumpeter and Zvezda have released recently, there have been no new plastic sailing ship kits for more than twenty years.