plastic models of ancient warships Q + short Heller Bireme review

The İmai/Academy Roman warship is a true gem, it is a real accurate and beautifully detailed rendition of a type of Roman warship known as liburna. Liburna was the workhorse of the Roman empire's patrolling squadrons from the channel to the black sea. İt was single banked, swift and easy to build in the even unsophisticated yards; carried a detachment of marines for both boarding action and reprisal landings to the hostile shores. İt was also often used as escort for grain convoys. The model is roughly 1/72 scale and undoubtedly the best ancient warship model avaliable on the plastic range.

Altough recently issued and well detailed, Zvezda 1/72 scale trireme is totally inaccurate. A trireme carried 170 oars pulled by single oarsmen, not 60-something as zvezda kit does. İt is also aphract (only two half decks cover the heads of two uppermost banks of oarsmen), not cataphract (fully covered upper deck). The two upper banks of oars are exposed to the elements and their respective broadsides are something of a lightweight "cagework". İn the battle, the broadsides are covered by leather aprons. The zvezda kit is a strange monstrosity that unites the heavy construction of later hellenistic and roman polyremes (up-scaled versions of trireme with oars pulled by differing numbers of oarsmen. The greatest of those floating fortresses were moved by the toil of more than 350 oarsmen and were as big as the 64 gun ships of the line of 18th century) with a strangely placed and even more strangely numbered oars. İt may be useful for wargamers but it certainly is not a scale model.

Here is a link to the picture of the first accurate trireme reconstruction of any scale since antiquity, the greek navy's olympias: http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/rowing/trireme/IMG_3194.jpg

The Heller bireme kit is again a very poor and inaccurate example of that company. altough I never saw the model itself, I have many photographs of it as built. İt has grotesque lines and apparently produced without any serious technical research. Totally useless.

For the aurora kit, I prefer not to comment much. I saw contents of the kit in a photograph at e-bay. The hull was clearly the same with the beautiful (altough very tentative and now out-fashioned) drawing of a bireme in Björn Landström's book The Ship. There were relatively few parts to assamble and the details looked to be quite plain but the measurements seemed reasonable and proportionate. I believe, if you can find it, you can build it into a nice, altough speculative model with a little extra effort.

For Viking ships, there is an awful, stomach turning 1/60 thrash by Heller; supposedly a replica of the Oseberg ship from 7th century. An incomparably superior 1/72 replica of the 9th century Gokstad ship was produced by Revell but sadly its OOP now. İt's the only accurate replica of a viking ship in plastic. Maybe (and hopefully), Emhar's upcoming viking ship is a repackaging of that sound product.

And a little addition: İt is possible to build a relatively large scale model of a late antiquity-early medieval warship of great importance; the byzantine dromon, in plastic. What you need here is to buy the 1/60 "viking ship" of aurora, today produced by Smer of Czech republic and in sale for about 4.50 $. That caricature of a viking ship, with her long and sleek carvel hull, gorgeous fore and aft decks provide a magnificent platform for an easy conversion. Saw off that comic dragon head and tail; replace the square sail with a latin one and put a greek fire siphon to the foredeck (the ukrainian 1/72 scale figures producer Orion has an amazing set of roman sailors which includes a superb lion-head shaped siphon and a fantastic rowing crew if you like to man your ship). Written accounts point that some dromons carried a lightweight triangular fighting platform for archers in the foredeck over the siphon and we may think that a cloth covered skipper's "house" shall be erected at the afterdeck. As both the written and visual descriptions of that very important type are very scarce, I think no one can accuse us for being totally inaccurate.

Hope this Helps

Best Regards

 

kapudan,

thanks for this informative post. By and large I share your overall judgement on the Zvezda kit, the Roman version of which would only be useable for a very short span of time anyway. Somehow the thought that this is actually based on a large-scale model by Andrea (if my memory serves me right) is lingering in the back of my head. As for the number of oars, that is off indeed, though not my such a wide margin, or so it seems to me - the "Roman trireme" has 122 oars (and actually space for 130), which may or may not be appropriate for a later polyreme; there's simply too little evidence there.

I also have to defend the Heller kit which is based on the Praeneste relief as well as a number of 1st to 2nd century depiction. It's main defect is that it is too short, which results - as you have rightly pointed out - in totally distorted proportions. However, by lengthening the hull appropriately you can actually arrive at quite a nice bireme warship. The main problem is that you probably need two kits for this - at least I will, as I'm too lazy to try to recreate all the detail - and they are quite rare.

I must say I'm a little sceptical on the Imai/Academy ship - while it certainly looks nice built-up, it lacks sufficient oar number for a Liburnian. It seems to be based on vessels shown on the Trajanic Column, which seem to have been ships belonging mainly to the Danibuan classes, but as is usually the case with these depictions they are badly distorted length-wise (which may be the reason why the Academy ship looks the way it does). While it thus shares a common fault with the Heller bireme, it's more difficult to rectify as the hull form of the Academy ship looks better out of the box, and too long if lengthened approriately. I have once considered turning it into a double-banked pentekontor, but that would make so many changes necessary you could just as well scratchbuild it.

Turning the Aurora, well, "object" into a dromon is really an interesting idea - while I have tried to convert it into a Nydam-type boat (with a not terribly convincing result), a small dromon might indeed be an interesting idea. Then again, we have so little evidence on these ships that probably anything goes. It's a pity there is nothing that can be turned into a large, double-banked dromon, which would make a very interesting model.

Incidentally, it seems the Emhar ship is an entirely new kit of the Gokstad ship and not a reissue of the old Revell one which indeed was the only acceptable one on the market; those Heller ships are not only notoriously difficult to build, but also woefully inaccurate.

Jorit

I agree with everything in Kapudan's post.  I did build the old Aurora bireme kit a couple of times many years ago.  My recollections of it aren't clear, but I remember it as a pleasant little kit designed primarily for young people.  It was quite simple and basic, with few parts (other than the oars, which probably were oversized).  And as Kapudan noted, it certainly didn't represent the state of the art in terms of research - even in those days.

Part of the problem in building models of ancient galleys at the moment is that the scholarly community has just gone through some major revisions in its interpretation of the sources.  The reproduction Greek trireme Olympias has caused a great deal of rethinking about how those old ships worked.  It's been established pretty firmly, for instance, that the image of the emaciated galley slave toiling away in the filthy, unventilated bowels of the ship for hours on end is a myth.  It takes a physically fit athlete to haul on one of those oars for more than a few minutes, and oarsmen have to be out in the open air.  If they aren't, their perspiration can't evaporate and they promptly pass out.

If some model company were to produce a kit for the Olympias (or a Greek trireme based on the information that project has provided), I'd gladly pay a good deal of money for it.  Unfortunately that seems highly unlikely.  The plastic sailing ship kit market is so small that almost all the manufacturers are ignoring it.

I also agree with Kapudan about the Viking ship situation.  When that Heller "Oseberg ship" kit was released I was ecstatic.  I was an undergraduate college student at the time, and I drove my Volkswagen beetle all the way from Columbus, Ohio to the Squadron Shop in Cleveland to buy one.  When I compared the contents of the box to some drawings and photos of the real Oseberg ship I was furious.  Heller has compounded the felony several times by re-releasing the thing, with slightly different parts, claiming it to be other ships (e.g., a ship of William the Conqueror's fleet).

The old Revell Viking ship, from 1972, is indeed worth seeking out.  It's a scale model of a full-size replica, now on public display in Chicago, that crossed the Atlantic for one of the Chicago World's Fairs.  That vessel is in turn a reproduction of the Gokstad Ship.  The Revell kit contains a couple of highly questionable parts to represent the dragon's head and tail at the bow and stern.  (Those parts of the real Gokstad Ship projected into a more acidic layer of soil in the burial mound, and rotted away before the ship was discovered.)  Otherwise it's a nice, accurate kit - by far the best representation of a Norse vessel that's come to my attention.  Unfortunately it's been out of production for more than thirty years.  It was in fact the last genuinely new sailing vessel that Revell (Revell of the U.S., that is) ever produced.  The company has now been out of the sailing ship kit business for considerably longer than it was ever in it.

This is a depressing subject.  If your interests can be stretched into the middle ages, a kit worth investigating is the new Zvezda Hanseatic cog.  I haven't seen it in the flesh, but by all accounts it's a nice kit.

jtilley wrote:

It's been established pretty firmly, for instance, that the image of the emaciated galley slave toiling away in the filthy, unventilated bowels of the ship for hours on end is a myth.

Just as a funny aside, this myth - about which I still don't understand how it came into existence as even only a cursory glance at the relevant sources proves beyond any conceivable doubt that it was otherwise - is still out in force and about the first thing I have to crush with my students.

Ben Hur apparently exerts a mightily powerful influence.

Jorit

Thump............thump............thump............"Battle...SPEED!".........thump.........thump.........thump.........thump........."Attack...SPEED!".......thump.......thump.......thump.......thump......."Ramming...SPEED!".....thump.....thump.....thump.....thump....."Waterskiing...SPEED!"...thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpa....

Somehow I pity the drummer and even more the guy with the whip - hitting them at waterskiing speed surely is pushing the latter's abilities to the very limit...

Jorit

I hope it's not too inconsiderate to bring up this older thread, but I stumbled across some old (and rather darkish) pictures I made some time ago of the Heller Bireme kit; and some of these may be of interest:



What becomes instantly noticeable is that Heller, wanting to do a good job at replicating a number of well-known depictions of warships from imperial times, was faced with a problem - almost all of these are distorted length-wise, resulting in ships having too many oars for their hull length. Unfortunately, the folks at Heller decided to stick to the hull length and reduced the number of oars, which is why they ended up with what looks slightly odd. Had they done otherwise, the model would be next to perfect.

The hull taped together in front of the quite impressive box art:



So it's too short. One is left with two alternatives - either finding another kit and lengthen it or turning it into a two-deck pentekontor (which would make some extensive reworking necessary, however).

Some of the smaller parts:



More smaller parts:



Vacuformed sails:



The instructions (which are a little uninspiring for my taste):



Second page of the instructions:



Jorit

jwintjes wrote:

...this myth - about which I still don't understand how it came into existence as even only a cursory glance at the relevant sources proves beyond any conceivable doubt that it was otherwise Jorit

Later Mediterranean galleys from 16-18th century were indeed by and large rowed by either serious convicts or christian slaves, depending on which side of the mediterranean the vessel came from.   This undoubtedly created in the public mind an indelible cultural impression that those who ply the oars of warships are all very right-deprived individuals.   It is a small, unexceptional step to anachronistically project this image back in time.   This projections gains additional credibility from its superficial conformance to the pervailing view that Roman world was veryarbitrary, tyrannical and full of slaves. What more convincing caricaturing of Roman tyranny is there besides galley slavery?
 

Chuck Fan wrote:

Later Mediterranean galleys from 16-18th century were indeed by and large rowed by either serious convicts or christian slaves, depending on which side of the mediterranean the vessel came from.   This undoubtedly created in the public mind an indelible cultural impression that those who ply the oars of warships are all very right-deprived individuals.   It is a small, unexceptional step to anachronistically project this image back in time.   This projections gains additional credibility from its superficial conformance to the pervailing view that Roman world was veryarbitrary, tyrannical and full of slaves. What more convincing caricaturing of Roman tyranny is there besides galley slavery?

I routinely blame it on Ben Hur. What I find difficult to swallow, however, is that I sometimes meet people who study either Greek or Latin clinging to this idea - if anyone, they should know better!

Jorit

  ah, shoot. and I always liked this kit,too...guess I will have to find the Revell version somewhere.

 

Jorit,

some months ago, we had an interesting discussion about the galleys in the French forum of marine et modlelisme d'arsenal (arsenal modeling).  Ancre Editions will publish, next year, amonograph about a French galley.

Mr Rouanne posted an interesting picture of a model of a galley built during the reign of the emperor Napoleon III

http://forum.aceboard.net/5500-553-26226-1-Questions-galeres.htm

There is a good book too (unfortunately in French) published some years ago : "quand voguaient les galères".  I have this book and the Conway book too.  I have the Amati model (not realistic though, once you have collected some informations about the galleys)

Did you see these pictures by Greek modelers :

Greek biremes :

http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/greekbireme

and Greek triremes :

http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/trireme

Thank you.

Michel

 

Michel,

first of all, thanks for the information and the useful links.

michel.vrtg wrote:

some months ago, we had an interesting discussion about the galleys in the French forum of marine et modlelisme d'arsenal (arsenal modeling).  Ancre Editions will publish, next year, amonograph about a French galley. Mr Rouanne posted an interesting picture of a model of a galley built during the reign of the emperor Napoleon III http://forum.aceboard.net/5500-553-26226-1-Questions-galeres.htm

Isn't that a model from the Musee de la Marine? She was indeed a very interesting vessel, constructed by Dupuy de Lome but unfortunaley a total failure. Every time I look at the cross section, the weight and the number of oars I'm always surprised again that the crew on the one sortie (which was the only one I think) when Napoleon was present they managed something about 5 knots. Quite a bizzare piece of engineering.

Incidentally, does anyone have bothered to search for her wreck? If I remember correctly she was sunk as a torpedo target .

and Greek triremes : http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/trireme

This is indeed quite impressive; I guess having a 1:1 model at hand is quite helpful. Looking at these pictures (and some from Olympias) really makes you want to throw the Zvezda thing out of the window.

Jorit

As an aside to Napoleon's, well, galley, it's interesting to note that already around 150 years earlier in 1693/94 a vessel was built by the Havelberg shipyard in Brandenburg. Similar to Napoleon's ship the Brandenburg galley (which was very small and built for sailing the inland waterways around Berlin) was built for representative purposes, and she was said to have been constructed with ancient galley types in mind. In fact, she looks broadly mediterranean with no particular ancient features, probably because knowledge of ancient vessels in the 17th century wasn't exactly broad.

Jorit

Isn't that a model from the Musee de la Marine?

 

This model was given by Emperor Napoleon III to the French naval museum in Toulon.  And you're right, this the model you are talking about, designed by the naval historian Jal and sunk during torpedo trials.

Michel

 

Hello Jorit,

I reactivate this thread again for I have question: May we obtain a proportionately accurate model of a roman bireme semblable to that of praeneste relief, by removing upper set of oars from the Zvezda "Roman emperor's ship" ?

kapudan_emir_effendi wrote:

Hello Jorit, I reactivate this thread again for I have question: May we obtain a proportionately accurate model of a roman bireme semblable to that of praeneste relief, by removing upper set of oars from the Zvezda "Roman emperor's ship" ?

The roman emperor's ship is too beamy for the relatively narrow hulls expected of a bireme.     The recurved stern piece is probably disproportionately large for any galley.     If you scale the ladders, you get some interesting inconsistencies with the size of the castles.    Rather than converting it into a bireme, I am working on converting it into a 1/100 scale octareme, on the assumption the three banks are rolled by 3 3 and 2 men respectively.     The original hull seem to scale to something like 1/90-1/100 scale based on the size of the railing, ladder, and stern tent.   In that scale the hull is easily wide enough to hold 6 rowers abreast, with a wide  gangway in the middle.
 

Chuck Fan wrote:

kapudan_emir_effendi wrote: Hello Jorit, I reactivate this thread again for I have question: May we obtain a proportionately accurate model of a roman bireme semblable to that of praeneste relief, by removing upper set of oars from the Zvezda "Roman emperor's ship" ? The roman emperor's ship is too beamy for the relatively narrow hulls expected of a bireme.     The recurved stern piece is probably disproportionately large for any galley.     If you scale the ladders, you get some interesting inconsistencies with the size of the castles.    Rather than converting it into a bireme, I am working on converting it into a 1/100 scale octareme, on the assumption the three banks are rolled by 3 3 and 2 men respectively.     The original hull seem to scale to something like 1/90-1/100 scale based on the size of the railing, ladder, and stern tent.   In that scale the hull is easily wide enough to hold 6 rowers abreast, with a wide  gangway in the middle.

I agree with Chuck; for a bireme, the proportions of the Zvezda kit are distinctly off. I still think the Heller kit, suitably lengthened, remains the best solution for a bireme.

Now, interestingly, Chuck's idea of "downscaling" it and thereby converting it into a (typologically) Hellenistic polyreme is exactly what I would suggest if asked what to do with a Zvezda kit. At 1/100 you end up with a large ship, which in turn justifies rather clunky lines. On top of that you get quite a large deck space that should easily accomodate artillery, something that's rather difficult to do in 1/72 on the Zvezda ships. Ideaolly one would want at least one or two heavy pieces and a coupl of light pieces in the bow.

The main problem - or not, taking into account that many people, yours truly included build or have built Santa Maria models... - is that we know preciously little about how these Hellenistic warships looked like. Currently I have one of Warry's reconstructions in front of me, which shows one of Demtrius Poliorcetes' Hepteres, which is not only painted in various shades of outrageous green but also is depicted as having a 4-3 rowing system. While it looks rather strange to me - the colour scheme certainly does - there's little to disprove it (though I think that generally 3-2-2 would be perfectly possible as well).

Jorit

A week ago my wife and I made a pilgrimage to a well-stocked hobby shop on an unusual mission:  to find a plastic kit that would make a good project for me to work on with my eight-year-old grandson, who's coming for a visit next month.  My wife being a public school world history teacher, her eyes lit up when she spied the Academy "Roman Warship."

As soon as we got it home and I looked inside the box, it was obvious that I'd made a mistake:  there's no way, with or without the help of an enthusiastic eight year old, that I could build that kit in a week.  Nor would the finished product fit in his suitcase so he could take it back to Texas.  A Tamiya 1/35 Triceratops is on its way from Squadron Mail Order to save the day.

But that little Academy kit really caught my attention.  I'm sure Jorit's comments about its accuracy earlier in this thread are on target, and the stated scale of 1/250 obviously is ridiculous (unless the oars were 70+ feet long, the elliptical shields hanging on the rails were 12 feet across, and the ship had an overall length of about 350 feet).  I don't see how it could be on quite as large a scale (1/72) as Kapudan suggested; there wouldn't be room for the oarsmen.  It looks to me like something between 1/100 and 1/150 would be believable.

Jorit implies that the kit originated with Imai; though I can't recall seeing it in an Imai box, I certainly can believe that.  It has the usual Imai touches:  nice, subtle "wood grain" detail, ingenious parts layout, excellent fit, and a really nifty base (including two brass-plated lions).  The injection-molded "sails" are easily the best things of that sort I've seen.  They're far too thick, of course, but they're beautifully shaped and have a fabric-like texture that, with careful painting, could be made to look pretty believable. 

But the parts that really caught my attention are the blocks and deadeyes.  They look like eighteenth- or nineteenth-century ones (which I'm sure makes their "Roman" pedigree questionable), but they're remarkable pieces of kit engineering.  They're molded in long, individual rows, and, in the case of both blocks and deadeyes, they feature both holes through their middles and grooves around their edges.  I didn't think that could be done with the injection-molding process; Heller, in its big Soleil Royal and Victory kits among many others, never managed to do it. 

Close inspection of the sprues reveals how it was done.  Each block and deadeye is attached to its sprue by two tiny gates near one of its faces.  Viewed from the side, almost the entire thickness of the part projects on one side of the sprue.  The mold apparently had four parts - like the "slide mold" system that Dragon brags about these days.  The sliding components of the mold slid in from the sides, forming the grooves around the blocks and deadeyes.

The instruction sheet for this kit says it was originally released (under the Academy label) in 1987.  That suggests that, indeed, the kit originated with Imai; no other plastic kit manufacturer of that era put that kind of thought and ingenuity into its products.  For that matter, no manufacturer has lavished that kind of care on a sailing ship kit since then.  Almost twenty years later, this kit still represents the state of the art. 

I find myself, not for the first time, wondering what the hobby would look like today if Imai hadn't gone out of business.

Kapudan:
Thanks for the idea of converting the Aurora Viking ship!  I've had one languishing in the closet for years aftr finding it at a yard sale.  From what I know of Byzantine dromons (which is little) the hull might be a little pudgy for an all-out warship, but the mists of time can make many things plausible.  It could be a well-protected yacht/light merchantman for that pirate infested trip to Trebizond.  I'm planning to rework the benches and add a second bank of oars- of course that meant buying another Smer reissue for the oars alone.  So much for utilizing stock on hand to generate space....
Andrew

I built the Academy ship a 2 years ago, and it was an absolute pleasure.  It went together so nicely, it garnered a championship at the local county fair out of the box.

 

I would post pictures of it, but due to gross negligence by my family members while I was at college rendered the ship a wreck.  Needless to say, the finished model does not belong crammed in the back of a cabinet with other crap jammed in against it......

I built the Aurora kit a few years ago and thought it was a cracker.  Its been marketed as different scales but I think it is clearly a Liburna with its shorter length, wide beam and shallow draft, so 1/72 seems fairly accurate.  I thought the kit seemed to be closely modelled on one of the liburnas excavated at Mainz on the river Rhine and there is a nice re-construction at the museum there.

Like the other Aurora kits I've tried the sails are nicely textured but too thick, and the rigging is nicely detailed.  I had a go at applying a bronze effect leaf on the ram and tail thingy rather than using paint and thought it worked really well.

jamiemcginlay wrote:

I thought the kit seemed to be closely modelled on one of the liburnas excavated at Mainz on the river Rhine and there is a nice re-construction at the museum there.

I always was under the impression that Aurora went out of business in the mid to late 1970s. The Mainz wrecks however were only found in 1981/82 and only conserved from 1992 onwards.

I'd love to see a kit of one of these ships, particularly of the lusoria, of which there's a nice working reconstruction at Regensburg university, but to the best of my knowledge there is none.

Jorit

AndrewGorman wrote:

Kapudan: Thanks for the idea of converting the Aurora Viking ship!  I've had one languishing in the closet for years aftr finding it at a yard sale.  From what I know of Byzantine dromons (which is little) the hull might be a little pudgy for an all-out warship, but the mists of time can make many things plausible.  It could be a well-protected yacht/light merchantman for that pirate infested trip to Trebizond.  I'm planning to rework the benches and add a second bank of oars- of course that meant buying another Smer reissue for the oars alone.  So much for utilizing stock on hand to generate space.... Andrew

Oh Gosh ! there had been quite a discussion since I reactivated the thread And I have some very hot news (actually the event happened some 5 minutes ago) closely related to thread. Good co-incidence !

You're welcome Andrew in fact, I was agonising about how to build this very important type of warship for long time. While watching the "greek fire" sequel of the discovery channel series "Lost Inventions" I saw the reconstructed fireship-dromons and shouted a big "Eureka !" after an instantaneous mating of the replica's hull with that of the "Viking (!) Ship". A quick revision of the related chapter in the "Age of the Galley" made clear that there were single banked light dromons too for patrolling and scouting. (that means you don't really need to make life difficult with double banking the kit ) Thus I decided this project. An even better news for me was that Anatolian Saljuk Sultanate navy and the squadrons of succeeding maritime ghazi beyliks (turkish princedoms) used perfectly that same kind of galley. My dromon will carry the double headed eagle of saljuks certainly.

Now the news. The Imai/Academy roman warship, though finely engineered, would cost me around 40 bucks, doesn't matter if I buy from Istanbul or online. By pure luck, I found an untouched Aurora Roman bireme from e(vil) bay and bought it for around 10 bucks. I expect, with shipping, it will cost me no more than 20-25 bucks. I think it's an extremely good deal for a mint aurora kit. Yet I hesitated a lot before bidding for this kit; as you have seen in my first post to this thread, I think the reconstruction from which this kit was created is out-fashioned now. But, after reading Professor Tilley's comments about Imai kit's scale, I thanked once more to my "irish luck". I absolutely wanted that my galley model would be in 1/72 scale and Aurora bireme is just that. I'm ready to swallow my opinion about this nice little kit now, for the sight of the finished product with figures of legionaries,sailors and archers on the deck; shall offset any disadvantage of an old-fashioned look I think.

Andreas Press, (related to Andreas Miniatures?), has a 64 page book on modeling ancient warships.

Full title citation

 

Amazon link at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8496527131/ref=pd_rvi_gw_1/104-9857342-8083909?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155

I post his to reactive the thread in honour of Revell (of Germany) 1/72 classic Viking ship's reissue

   It would be extremely intresting to see a video of the Greek navy's Trireme Olympias actually being rowed by all those oarsmen, why the heck is it that there is no such ambitious projects like this in America? Thanks for this very interesting discussion on these vessels.  Karl

I understand that an alternative interpretation of 'trireme', 'quinquireme', etc. is that it referred to the number of rowers in a 'cell' or 'room' on one side of the hull, e.g. 3 rowers or 5 rowers, rather than to the number of oars per 'cell' or 'room'.

Under that interpretation, those 3 rowers might have handled 2 oars, and those 5 rowers might  have handled 3 oars, rather than 3 or 5 oars, respectively.

Cheers,

vonB.

P.S.: Apologies for the 'threadomancy'.

 

 

Yes, 4 and above almost certainly used several rowers on some of the oars, so the -reme count correspond to the number of men per group of oars rather than the number of tiers of oars.   But during the classical period tri-remes were generally taken to have 3 tiers of oars, with one man to each oar.

 

Hm, this thread has certainly been informative, not to mention slightly depressing in the sense that I've thought about getting a Roman warship to complement my WW2 armor models for some time (I've been in love with Ancient Rome ever since reading Asterix as a wee lad). It appears to me that at the present point in time there are no kits in plastic that would result in anything but a caricature of what happen to be very elegant vessels. And that's a shame.