This brings back some memories. Here's what I wrote about this kit in another Forum thread a few months ago:
In about 1965 (that's forty years ago, folks; don't trust my memory) my family took a vacation trip to Washington, DC and my father took me to a fine old hobby shop, called Core's. (I imagine it went out of business decades ago.) On one of the shelves was a stack of UPC sailing ship kits. (I suppose it's possible that they were from MPC - but I don't think MPC was in business in 1965. I could well be mistaken about that, though.) One of them, I think, was a Victory. Since I'd already built the Revell Victory I wasn't interested in that one. But the one that grabbed my attention was a kit that purported to represent H.M.S. Prince - the one from the reign of Charles II. (This was long before the Airfix Prince was released.) My father, generous man that he was, gave me the necessary $3.00 to buy it.
When we got back to the hotel room and I took the cellophane off the box I got a shock. The hull halves looked sort of like a seventeenth-century ship-of-the-line, but even my 14-year-old eyes could tell this wasn't a scale model of the Prince. All the other parts, which were sealed in a plastic bag, looked identical to the components of the Revell Victory, with which I was intimately familiar. My father and I concluded that the bag of Victory parts had been put in the box by mistake. My father thereupon took the model back to the store. The clerk opened up another Prince kit, which was identical. He and my father then took a careful look at the instructions, which matched the parts. The kit wasn't defective; the manufacturer really was selling a copy of the Revell Victory as the Prince, with no changes other than the hull halves and the transom (and probably a few other parts, such as the figurehead).
UPC, if I'm not mistaken, released no original kits of its own. I'm pretty sure this...thing...originated with some Japanese manufacturer and was sold in the US under the UPC label. It had a couple of other amusing characteristics. The underwater portions of the hull halves carried a series of wide, shallow, vertical grooves, vaguely (but only vaguely) reminiscent of the unplanked framing seen on "Board Room style" models from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The hull halves were molded in a marbled, greenish gold color, and the underwater portions were prepainted a bright, garish red. And the box art was really remarkable. It was a painting of the Prince, at anchor in a harbor surrounded by other elaborately-decorated warships with flags flying. The Japanese artist had also gone to considerable trouble to show the unplanked frames of the ship projecting above the waterline, with blue sky visible between them. It was pretty clear that the people responsible for this travesty had been looking at a photo of the "Board Room" model of the Prince, which is now in the Science Museum in London. (It's one of the most photographed of historic ship models. I suspect the designers were looking at a picture in a book.) They apparently had no idea what they were looking at, and thought the unplanked bottom was literally accurate. I do wonder how they thought a ship built like that would be able to float.
It's a relief to see, in those pictures on E-bay, that my memory was reasonably accurate (for once).
Maybe one point needs to be clarified: this UPC atrocity most emphatically is not a reboxing of the Airfix kit. The latter came out several years after this...thing...did. Many Airfix kits were sold for a while in the U.S. under the label of MPC - which was a different company from UPC. (UPC, as noted above, did not, to my knowledge, make any original kits; all its products seem to have been reissues. They may have included some Airfix originals, but I don't recall any.)
The Airfix Prince, as has been noted before here in the Forum, is a fine kit - one of the better plastic sailing ships. (In some ways it's better detailed than the famous contemporary Admiralty model in the Science Museum. Take a look at the way that seventeenth-century modeler handled the windows in the stern, and compare them to Airfix's rendition.) My one major reservation about the Airfix kit concerns the guns: those below the weather decks are "dummies," stub barrels that plug into holes in the middle of the recessed squares that represent the gunports. One approach to that problem, of course, is to glue the portlids shut. But if only Airfix had provided full-length barrels and carriages for the lower deck guns - like Revell did years earlier in its little Constitution....