Constructo "Santa Maria" at scale 1:100 vs. Revell "Santa Maria" at scale 1:90

There's quite a bit of "cross-pollenation" between the plastic and wood ship kit worlds.  Back in the early fifties, Pyro (aka "Pirate Plastics") based several of its plastic kits on wood ones from Marine Models and Model Shipways.  And several wood kit manufacturers have based kits on plastic products.  Unfortunately there's no agency to oversee this sort of skullduggery.  (I've never heard of one ship model company suing another one for stealing a design for a ship model - though I do remember that Revell got into some serious trouble some years back for putting photographs of Tamiya and Hasegawa models on Revell boxes.)

One that really irritated me was a U.S.S. Constitution that was released quite a few years ago by one of those big, glitzy Italian companies.  (I think it was Mamoli, but I'm not sure.)  It was advertised as being on 1/98 scale - a rather odd one.  I was working in a hobby shop at the time, and I remember the fancy brochure the manufacturer sent out to publicize this...thing.  One of its most heavily-promoted features was a set of brass castings representing the bow and stern ornamentation.  These parts were sold separately, in a special wood box lined with black velvet.  Looking at the photos in the brochure, the first thing that occurred to me was that the parts looked remarkably like their counterparts in the Revell plastic Constitution.  The Revell kit, of course, is on 1/96 scale.  Brass castings shrink by about two percent as they cool.  It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out what was going on there.

In the case of the Santa Maria I suppose we ought to be charitable.  Nobody knows what the real ship looked like.  Over the years quite a few speculative plans of this ship have been drawn by naval architects and ship modelers.  Some of those plans have been published.  It's entirely possible that Revell and Constructo based their kits, independently, on the same set of plans.  But I wouldn't be the at all surprised if the wood company simply bought one of the plastic kits and used its measurements as the basis for a wood kit.