L'Orient

Back in the late seventies Heller issued two kits representing French 74-gun ships of the Napoleonic period.  I believe they were on 1/150 scale.  One was named Le Superbe; I've forgotten the name of the other.  I'm pretty sure the kits were virtually identical.  They weren't bad, as far as accuracy and detail were concerned, though they did have some problems.  (Their decks were perfectly flat, and the "wood grain" texture on the hulls implied that each had been hacked out of a single enormous log.)  I think Heller also issued a tiny version of Le Superbe, on about 1/500 scale, a few years later.  To my knowledge, those are the only French Napoleonic warships that have appeared in plastic kit form.

People sometimes don't realize how utterly tiny the total range of sailing ship subjects taken up by plastic kit manufacturers is.  Lindberg used to make a French frigate, La Flore; just which of several frigates of that name the kit represents is a matter of some controversy, but it certainly has the look of a late-eighteenth- or very-early-nineteenth-century French frigate.  There are, of course, several versions of H.M.S. Victory and the U.S.S. Constitution, and Revell has cloned its Constitution kits a couple of times and put the name United States on them.  Unless I've forgotten something, those are the only plastic sailing ship kits from the period 1789-1815.  (I suppose we could, by stretching logic to its absolute limits, include the various kit renditions of H.M.S. Bounty, which at the time of the French Revolution was sailing around in the South Pacific seeking a refuge for her crew of mutineers and Polynesians - and would never be seen again by anybody else.)

If you're willing to consider something a great deal smaller, you might want to check out the range of kits produced by the British manufacturer Skytrex.  It makes a series of 1/700 British, French, Spanish, and American sailing ship kits, with cast metal hulls and spars and photo-etched brass sails, shrouds, and ratlines.  The company's primary market obviously is the wargame trade, but the castings are remarkably detailed and, from what I can tell, pretty accurate.  (The only one I've got is H.M.S. Victory.  It's the only Victory kit on the market that shows her with shoulder-high forecastle bulwarks, which she probably had at Trafalgar.)  The French range does include L'Orient.  The Skytrex web site is www.skytrex.com.  From the home page, click on "ships," then "Meridian Trafalgar 1/700 Ships," then on "French."

Sorry to be a bit discouraging; maybe some other Forum member can think of a kit I've forgotten.

L'Orient was the 120 gun flagship of the French Admiral Brueys. The ship caught fire and blew up at the Battle of the Nile.

I don't know of any kit of this ship, but the other Heller 74 mentioned by John Tilley is the 'Glorieux' (1:150) still currently in production. I think he is right in that it is the same basic kit as Le Superbe.

I have both kits in my loft, but I think I will make the 'Glorieux' version first. The idea is to modify and rig it in accordance with Boudriot's 74 Gun ship volumes - a good kit bash project.

I don't know of any plastic model of French napoleonic first rate, or plastic model of any first rate besides the Victory and Soleil Royal for that matter.   

If you are willing to do major plastic surgery, I think you can do a credible conversion of a HMS Victory kit into a generic French Napoleonic first rate.     I don't know of any good drawings of the L'Orient.    But all French first rate of the Napoleonic wars were built off of the same set of drafts prepared by Sene.   So L'Orient should be very similar to the Le Commerce de Marseille.   A good set of drawings of the Le Commerce exists in the NMM.

Hello Bob,

I can add few things to professor Tilley's post. Only heller produces french napoleonic ship of the line kits. We are lucky that 1/150 Le Superbe is one the best Heller products and represents the backbone class of Marine Nationale; with over a hundred units produced; many used well after the Napoleonic Wars. Even, a few captured by the Royal Navy gained glory under union jack.  Provided you obtain taffrail decoration and figurehead details of individual ships (and of course if you can engrave/sculpt), you can build some of the most famous ships of the french naval history. I suggest that, if you would like to buy, prefer Le Superbe for she's an accurate kit while her "sister" Le Glorieux' elaborately carved taffrail is pure fancy. Also, Superbe's plain taffrail is a perfect tabula rasa for upgrade with the decorations of a particular vessel. For the first rates, there is the 1/200 Royal Louis. Altough she is built to a draught of 1759, as far as I know, French first rates were of a nearly unchanged  design from the end of the seven years war to the end of napoleonic wars. So,same thing can be applicable to Royal Louis, though you may need to work harder to have a more "up to date" hull of the napoleonic wars (greatest difficulty is, without doubt,coppering the hull). A heavy rebuilding, more properly a semi-scratchbuilding of Lindberg La Flore shall produce a frigate of 9 pounder kind.

kapudan_emir_effendi wrote:

For the first rates, there is the 1/200 Royal Louis. Altough she is built to a draught of 1759, as far as I know, French first rates were of a nearly unchanged  design from the end of the seven years war to the end of napoleonic wars.

A 1/400 scale line drawing of her in Laszlo and Wodenmen show a ship whose sheer and detailed arrangements such as gun ports, bulwurk, etc that are considerably different from the 1788 Commerce de Marsaille shown in Garndiner.   I don't have detailed dimension data on the 1759 Royal Louis.  However, Gardiner does offer dimensions of another French 120 gunner from 1764,  the Ville de Paris.   Those dimensions were very dramatically different from the later, much larger Sene designed French Napoleonic 120 gunners.    The Ville de Paris was 177 feet long by 47.5 feet broad on the lower gun deck, and 23 feet deep.    The later Napoleonic French 120 gunners were 205 feet long by 55 feet by 25 feet respectively.     In other words, the difference in dimension between 120 gun Ville de Paris of 1764 and 120 gun Commerce de Marsaille of 1788 were greater than the difference between those of an average English 64 gunners and 80 gunners of the 1770 era.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that while French warships in general had a strong reputation for being much larger than contempoary English ships of nominally comparable gun power, the Ville de Paris quite bucked this trend if Gardiner is to be believed.    As a 120 gunner, she was, according to Gardiner, in every dimension smaller than the nearly contempoary English 100 gunner HMS Victory.   In fact, Ville was dimensionally close to the old French 120 gunners from the Louis XIV era, and did not seem to benefit from the general growth in warship size that occurred during the 70 years before her construction.    This could be explained by the fact that while the English continued to develope and build first rates throughout the 18th century, with each successive class incrementally enlarged compared to their immediate predecessors, the continental powers largely abandoned the construction of 1st rates for the first half of the 18th century.   As a result continental 1st rate designs picked up in 1760 where they had left off in 1690s where as English benefitted from continuous growth over this period.    But by 1788, new Sene designed French first rates were again much larger than English first rates.

The (all new) reference about Le Commerce de Marseille and l'Orient :

http://perso.orange.fr/gerard.delacroix/118/plaquette-e.htm

The new monograph,by Gerard Delacroix, with 1/48 ! scale plans.

Michel

 

Thanks for the info, everybody. Since I'm getting older, I've noticed the smaller scales seem to be getting even smaller!!! Since no one seems to make a kit of this particular shipin any of the larger scales, guess I'm out of luck. It was just a "whim" anyway, after watching the "Deep Sea Detectives" episode on the Battle of the Nile.

Regarding the Heller French 74-gun ship kits - I haven't seen either of them "in the flesh" for years.  I do, however, remember (to the extent that my senile brain remembers anything these days) writing a review of Le Superbe for a British magazine, Scale Models, when the kit was initially released.  My recollection is that I gave it a fairly good review; I remember thinking that Heller had come a long way, in terms of concern for accuracy, since the Soleil Royal of a few years earlier.  As I remember, the negative points I found were as follows (starting with the less significant ones):

1.  The cheeks of the gun carriages were parallel, rather than following the taper of the gun barrels.  (Not a big deal except in the case of the guns on the weather decks, which could be fixed without a great deal of difficulty.)

2.  The rigging diagrams were utterly irrational.  Some of the worst Heller ever did - which is saying a good deal.

3.  The spar components didn't have much detail.

4.  The belaying pins, or some of them at any rate, had sharp points.  (A belaying pin with a pointy end is pretty silly.  Somebody in the Heller plant apparently thought belaying pins were pounded through the pinrails with brute force.)

5.  The hull halves had "wood grain" detail, but no indication of the edges of the planks.  The result was that the entire hull looked like it had been hacked out of a single, impossibly enormous tree.

6.  Most seriously, the deck components, though the planking detail on them wasn't too bad, were perfectly flat.  In that respect the kit duplicated one of the major errors of the Heller Soleil Royal.   Deck camber - the slight but quite noticeable upward arc of a deck near at the ship's center line - has been a fundamental component of ship construction for hundreds of years.  There's no doubt whatever that French warships of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - like virtually all large sailing vessels of every period - had deck camber.  A flat deck on a model of such a ship just doesn't look right. 

How important those problems are, I'll leave to the individual modeler.  All of them except the lack of deck camber could be fixed fairly easily - though adding the planking detail to the hull halves would be a challenge.  The deck components, of course, could be replaced with wood, and the camber added; the big difficulty would lie in adding the camber to the bulkheads, transom, etc.

Heller in those days was constantly improving its ship kits.  These 74s certainly represented a big step forward from Le Soleil Royal, which in turn was light years ahead of such kits as that so-called "Oseberg Ship" the Royal Louis, La Syrene, and various other earlier ventures.  At about the same time (the late seventies) the galley La Reale appeared; for my money it may be the best kit Heller ever produced.  And shortly after the two French 74s came the 1/100 H.M.S. Victory.   With that one, Heller apparently discovered (among many other things) the concept of deck camber.  That kit not only has camber built into the deck and bulkhead parts, but includes a series of plastic "deck beams" to make sure the camber is right.  

Not long after that, Heller got out of the sailing ship kit business.  Our good Forum friend Michel vrtg has told us about some of the projects that were in the planning stage at that time - including a Sovereign of the Seas, Henri Grace a Dieu, and, if I remember correctly, H.M.S. Prince.  If those kits had continued in the direction Heller was headed, they might well have been masterpieces.

Actually, the decks on my Heller SR are properly cambered.  The railing at the back of the forecastle, and at the front of the quarter deck and poop deck is molded with the proper upward bowing to accommodate the camber.

But unfortunately the cambering seems to be just about the only feature of the SR's deck that Heller likely got right.   Such a sparsely furnished deck as depicted by Heller is at odds with the deck of every good contempary model that came down to us.    The upper deck of big prestige ships of the era were at least as lavishly decorated with gilded reliefs and carved figures as the stern.

Also, Heller went out of its way to provide the SR with 4 tiny, ridicoulous capstans on the lower deck.   The designer clearly had no idea what duties the sailing ship's capstan can be called upon to do, or how much an anchor could weigh.

Sounds like my memory of the Soleil Royal kit (both the memory and the kit being close to thirty years old now) is defective.  Maybe - just maybe - Heller has actually modified the molds since I bought mine - but I think we can rule out that possibility.  I do know the decks of the two 74 kits are flat, though; I put that comment in writing in that magazine review at the time.

I'll give Heller credit on one other point.  When its 1/100 Victory was new I reviewed it in two British magazines, Scale Models and Model Shipwright.  (I'd have to look up the dates, but that must have been in about 1978 or 1979.)   Both reviews were quite favorable, of course, but I did point out what I saw - and still see - as some serious flaws in the kit:  the lack of yard parrels, the silly solution to the Great Ratline Problem, the unusable blocks and deadeyes, the lack of interior detail in the boats, the absurd English "translation" of the instructions, and a few others.  In the next issue of Scale Models, Heller reprinted a big excerpt of the review in the form of an ad.  (Some of the more negative comments weren't there, but the essence was.)