Apologies in advance for this really pathetic, lame question....

Thanks RG for the input. I read your other post on the Jolly Roger as well. Going to have to hit a Hobbylobby after the holidays, if I have any money leftover from Black Friday!

My choice for a pirate ship would be the Lindberg Jolly Roger, actually the "la Vestal" It has a history as a Privateer in 1780 and 1792.    The other ship, Wappen von Hamburg  was used to protect the merchant fleets from pirates.    Of these two models the Wappen von Hamburg is more highly detailed with more parts and  potential for a more complex painting scheme.  I have both models , 1/2 price from Hobby Lobby, $ 7.00 dollars each.  I am in the planning stage to build  the Captain Kidd, actually the Wappen von Hamburg. Using various painting techniques  this could be  a very nice model..   

Good Luck

This links to a Philippine forum. Check out their model site.

 http://timawa.net/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=2a7ced7cd6e30c5ffdcf996d7725716a&board=5.0

I got it after using your link, cthulhl77, thanks.

The old Revell Charles W. Morgan (Whaler) could also be modified for this purpose.

subfixer wrote:

What about modern pirates? What are they using nowadays? I'm talking about the the kind plaguing the waters off of Indonesia. Fast launches? Fishing boats? That might be an interesting subject, too.

 

   When doing a review for MM on the PT-15 (or 815, depending) I stumbled across this great site:

http://www.geocities.com/opus224/pn.htm

 

Looks like it will boil down to a coin toss at Hobbylobby between Lindberg's Captain Kidd and Jolly Roger, uinless someone has some strong comments in faveor of one or the other.

For the money I could do a lot worse.

One of the replies mentioned tacking the "Pirate ship" label on many a sailing ship model - a la Lindberg - to spark interest and increase sales. The companies out there should follow that advice. I normally build armor, but passing the kit by on the shelf with "Pirate" and "Jolly Roger" on the box hit that primal nerve from childhood.

Just so you don't think I'm a completely lazy troll, I did a Google against Pirate+ships; yowza, there's a ton of info out there.  Here are a few links for anyone else who has the yen for pirate info;

http://www.inkyfingers.com/pyrates/ships/

http://www.piratesinfo.com/detail/detail.php?article_id=46

http://www.geocities.com/captcutlass/Ship.html

http://www.kipar.org/piratical-resources/pirate-ships.html

http://whyfiles.org/036pirates/queen_annes_revenge.html

http://www.noquartergiven.net/

http://www.sonic.net/~press/

Arrrrrg!

Zvezda (Russian kit maker) has a brigantine.  About 15 years ago Lindberg had a kit for a Privateer (a licenced pirate vessel) that was a small vessel with only about 10 guns. 

Dave

The type of ship used by pirates depends on period, Geographic location and nationality of the beholder. Sir Francis Drake was regarded as a pirate by the Spanish as was Sir Richard Grenville so the Golden Hinde and the Revenge would have been classed as pirate ships by the Spanish.

The ships used by the Barbary Pirates or Corsairs, very fast lateen rigged or rowed boats would be pirate ships in the eyes of the Americans. So do a bit more research in your favoured area and time and I'm sure a model will present itself.

Dai

LoL!  I had forgotten about the brouhaha over RBT.  I saw the Lindberg kit over at Hobbly Lobbidy not so very long ago, too.

The Lindburg kit has many of the same hiccups as the old wood kit (like being way-overgunned, with unworkable guns--but, that's not that unusual <g>)

Hmm, just looked, Mamoli, Corel, and Mantua all have "pirate-ing" kits; perhaps they see a market in the way you suggest.  Hmm, the Mamoli Captain Morgan actually "looks" right, only 4 guns, but plenty of room for the boarding party, and rig enough to sail faster than her prey . . .

I like the idea of using the Heller lugger kit (I'm having trouble remembering the name they attached to it) for the purpose - if you can find it.  The problem is that, though Heller has issued a large range of sailing ship kits over the years, only a handful of them are in the company's current catalog.  (Most of them, in all honesty, weren't really serious scale models; at least half were modified versions of each other.  A few weeks ago one of the Forum's European members, Michel, was talking about compiling a list of all the Heller sailing ship kits.  We haven't heard from him in a while.  I wonder if the magnitude of the task made him lose his will to live.)

One kit that might - just might - be made into a believable pirate vessel is the one currently being sold by Lindberg under the label "Independence War Schooner."  It is in fact a reboxing of the old Pyro American revenue cutter Roger B. Taney.  (The Pyro kit was, in fact, ripped off back in the early fifties from a wood kit representing the same vessel from Model Shipways.  The two owners of Model Shipways referred to Pyro as "Pirate Plastics."  Note the connection.)  The vessel in question is a two-masted topsail schooner with a "Baltimore clipper" hull, dating from the late 1830s.  That's pretty late for piracy, but as I understand it a few Baltimore clippers did end up in the piracy trade.  The trick would be to make the kit look like something other than a Morris-class revenue cutter.  Their shapes were pretty distinctive.

As we've noted elsewhere in this Forum, that word "piracy" has a mystical attraction for lots of people.  The kit manufacturers are missing a market here.  A plastic kit representing a believable 17th- or 18th-century pirate schooner or brig would attract a fair number of customers.  Maybe some manufacturer will get interested in the shipwreck investigation that's going on in my neck of the woods - the wreck that's believed to be (though not definitively identified as) Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge.  My guess is that a model based on that wreck would be one of the best-selling sailing vessel kits ever.

What about modern pirates? What are they using nowadays? I'm talking about the the kind plaguing the waters off of Indonesia. Fast launches? Fishing boats? That might be an interesting subject, too.

Doesn't (or didn't) Heller have a "Lugger" in their 1/200 line?  I want to remember seeing a two-masted, lateen-rigged vessel at least in box art.  That would be precisely be the sort of thing used in piracy.

For the traditional Hollywood pirate ship, any of those Lindberg offerings would suffice.  Even Revell made a glow in the dark pirate ship than used to keep me up at night staring at the skull and crossbones on the mainsail.  This was their Mayflower that had four cannons added to the kit and required special glow in the dark paint.

Other models that make good “Pirate Ships” are Revell’s Golden Hind and Spanish Galleon.  I also liked making the old Revenge kit by Life Like to resemble a pirate ship.

For a "real" pirate ship, well, that is pretty much non-existent.  A pirate ship and privateer could be argued as being one of the same depending on who was at war with whom and who was working for whom during the war.  They both, as far as design, would have been identical to serve the intended purpose of attacking weakly armed, slow moving, merchant ships.  The ships were small in order to require small crews, be fast, and have shallow drafts in order to hide out in coves and rivers.   So what you need to find, and JTilly suggested, are schooners, sloops and brigs.  Other than an old Pryro /Auroa Brig of War, I do not know of any ships that are in plastic that match these criteria.

 So get a kit that we just mentioned, break out the dark, evil colored paint, and run up and skull and crossbones and have some fun.

 

Scott

The two Lindberg "pirate ships" are reissues of old kits.  The "Jolly Roger" is a reboxing of the French 18th-century frigate La Flore, and "Captain Kidd" is the 17th-century German ship-of-the-line Wappen von Hamburg.  Neither of them, frankly, is believable as a pirate ship.

There is, of course, virtually no such thing as a pirate ship that was built for the purpose.  (I can recall one character, Steed Bonnet, who had a vessel built with the deliberate intent of taking up piracy, but that was an extremely rare example.)  Pirates generally took their ships from somebody. 

The ideal representative pirate ship, I guess, would be a fairly small sloop, schooner or brig (one or two masts) from the early to mid-eighteenth century.  So far as I'm aware there is, unfortunately, no such vessel currently available in the plastic kit market.

The plastic sailing ship world is almost dead at the moment.  There have been almost no genuinely new kits in that category for about twenty years. The existing ranges have many, many enormous gaps in them.  This is one.

Sorry not to have been more helpful - or optimistic.

Figure that the pirate would have the ship they could most easily have taken away from somebody.  Therefore - smaller would be more likely.  In my mind, the Jolly Roger (the smaller of the two you suggest) is way too big and military anyway.  But it's the more likely of the two.

(On the other hand, the Captain Kidd kit is of a ship 60 or 80 years older than the small frigate in the Jolly Roger box.  And piracy wore out by the early 1700s, for the most part)

The Blackbeard kit is of an earlier ship - maybe 100 years too early for Blackbeard?

So all in all, Lindberg doesn't make a really exact match, but for the ballpark you're looking for, your imagination can be your guide.

When (not IF) you build it, make it ratty, not like a properly maintained frigate in somebody's navy.  The figurehead won't be in perfect condition; the gingerbread around the stern won't be neatly painted and detailed.

Best of luck
Rick H

Aaarr, me matey, nfafan...I canna be helping ye much, truly...aaarrrrrhhh (but I can stop torturing you with this Pirate accent).

I'm no expert, but from what I've read, pirate ships were often smallish and fast and shallow draft. I would think the "realistic" choice would be the "Jolly Roger". The "movie" choices would be #1 - Capt Kidd and #2 Blackbeard (more Spanish galleon types with heaps of guns).

 

Fair winds.