Michel's point about the use of "HMS" is most interesting. I think he's correct in implying that many authors use it too casually.
Most well-researched books on naval history and ship modeling seem to start applying "HMS" sometime during the seventeenth century. (Certainly no earlier. I don't think any reputable author would refer to Sir Francis Drake's ship as "HMS Golden Hind.") I've seen the abbreviation applied to the Prince in some pretty respectable publications - including, I believe, Donald McNarry's books and the Science Museum's little books about its ship model collection. (I may be mistaken about that; I'll see if I can check and make sure today.) "HMS" certainly appears before the names of seventeenth-century models in the Naval Academy Museum.
BUT...when it comes to figuring out when "HMS" (or H.M.S.; let's stipulate that the presence or absence of the periods varies with the editor) started to be used in the documents of the British (or English) navy itself, I'm much less confident. When I was working on my book about the Royal Navy during the American Revolution I had occasion to look at hundreds of contemporary documents written by naval officers, government officials, and various other folks during the 1770s and 1780s. I can't recall every having run across the abbreviation "HMS" in any of those documents. "His Majesty's ship" (or "his Britannic Majesty's ship") was quite common, and I think I occasionally saw "H.M. ship" (or "H.M. Frigate," or "H.M.Sloop," or whatever). But the practice of putting "HMS" in front of ship names as a matter of course seems to be relatively recent.
Another point about those eighteenth-century documents: I personally have never seen one that didn't put the article "the" in front of a ship's name - unless some expression like "his Majesty's ship" was there instead. Even in that construction, the normal phraseology was "his Majesty's ship the Victory." My theory is that "the" started getting omitted from ship names when the telegraph came into use, because every word sent in a telegram cost money. But that's just a guess.
Another term that I've never seen in anything written by a naval officer or official in the eighteenth century is "man of war." The expression certainly existed at the time. (Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt includes a duet for two basses on the text "The Lord is a man of war/ God is his name," which has nothing to do with ships.) But I think the use of the term to describe warships dates from some later time. Eighteenth-century documents do use the phrase "ship of war" - usually as a synonym for "ship of the line." ("The channel around Sandy Hook is navigable at high tide to any vessel smaller than a ship of war.") For that matter, I don't think eighteenth-century writers used the word "warship." (I remember a letter from Sir George Rodney in which he described two warships of the American Continental Navy as "vessels belonging to his Majesty's Rebellious and Piratical Subjects armed for war." Sir George knew how to turn a phrase.)
It looks to me as though "HMS" came into more-or-less official usage sometime in the very late eighteenth or nineteenth century, and shortly thereafter started getting applied retroactively to earlier periods, as it has been ever since. (If that be a sin, I have to plead guilty to it myself.) For an American like me, though, to be passing judgment on such a subject would be idiotically presumptuous. Maybe some knowledgable British historian has published something that clears up the matter definitively, but if so I haven't seen it. (I do recall reading a brief note in The Mariner's Mirror by David Lyon, of the National Maritime Museum, in which he established that "His [or Her] Majesty's ship" was a seventeenth-century expression. But I've never read a thorough, authoritative discussion of when the abbreviation came into use.)
Regarding Prince plans and kits - All I about the new "Victory Models" operation is what I've read on the Model Ship World website. I have the impression that it's a British project, with Amati providing the money and distribution but little else. That site contains a most interesting discussion, by the designer, of the forthcoming Prince kit; he makes it clear that it's a brand new product, owing little or nothing to the old Amati version. As I've said so many times before, the quality of HECEPOB kits undoubtedly varies; I've never seen either the old Amati kit or the new Constructo one. But on the basis of the ones I have seen, and the reports I've gotten from people who've bought other ones, I would suggest extreme wariness regarding the plans in those kits. And if what you're interested in is the rigging, put your trust in either R.C. Anderson or James Lees - or both.