I measured the Revell kit this evening. The keel (including the little piece of it that's molded integrally with the rudder) is 7 5/16" long; on 1/96 scale that's the equivalent of 58' 6". The maximum beam (including the wales, but not the channels) is 2 9/16", or 20' 6" on the scale.
I measured the the overall length of the hull, but then my senile brain forgot to write it down; I'll check it again tomorrow. I couldn't measure the depth of hold, because I've already fastened the maindeck down.
I've spent some time perusing the two articles in Ships in Scale. With all due respect to the late Mr. Aker, I have to say I have some big reservations about them. Most of those reservations probably are related to the fact that Mr. Aker didn't write the articles himself; they're based, apparently, on the notes he left behind.
My big complaint with the articles as they stand (I imagine they'd look a good deal different if Mr. Aker had lived to complete them himself) is that they don't clarify how much of the material in them is based on hard evidence and how much is inference. We are told, for instance, that the ship "had no gallery at the stern." Period. Is that emphatic assertion based on some contemporary document ("I look'd for ye sterne Gallerie, and lo, it was Not theyr"), or did Mr. Aker simply not find any evidence that she did have one? I rather suspect the latter - but the text doesn't tell us.
A bit later in the first article we're told, again quite emphatically, that "she had 22 gunports for 18 guns, 12 of cast iron and 6 of bronze....Five guns were on each broadside on the gun deck, and two were in the stern, pointing aft....Two lighter bronze guns were in the forecastle and four in the aftercastle." Unless Mr. Aker found some remarkably detailed document that eluded Professor Kelsey (which I doubt), most of that is guesswork. And Mr. Aker's own, very well-rendered perspective sketch of the ship clearly shows six broadside guns per side.
The whole text is written like that. It's full of statements phrased like established facts, many of which I think are nothing more or less than Mr. Aker's eminently qualified interpretations of the same meager evidence that other authorities have studied - and, in some cases, interpreted somewhat differently. (The layout of the ship's internal spaces is, I'm pretty certain, based almost entirely on conjecture.) The "bibliography" at the end of the second article contains precisely four books, all of them secondary sources written in the twentieth century: William Baker's two accounts of the design of the Mayflower II and R.C. Anderson's two books on seventeenth-century rigging. The implication is that Mr. Aker made a thorough study of contemporary sources, but the articles don't give us a hint as to what those sources were.
In its general shape, size, and rig the Aker reconstruction resembles the Hoeckel/Revell one in many ways. The basic hull lines and proportions of both clearly were based on the old Matthew Baker Manuscript - as Mr. Aker acknowledges. There are, however, two conspicuous differences. In addition to omitting the aformentioned stern gallery (the Hoeckel/Revell version has one), Mr. Aker gave the ship an additional deck. His main battery sits on a "gundeck" one level below the maindeck.
I find either configuration believable. That extra deck would have helped accommodate the "about sixty men and boys" who, according to the articles, made up the ship's crew. I'm not convinced that figure is right, though. Professor Kelsey found contemporary documents that gave figures from ranging from 140 to 164 people for the entire expedition, which consisted of four ships. The Golden Hind presumably would have had the biggest crew of the four, but sixty may be a bit on the high side.
None of the foregoing is intended to suggest that any feature of Mr. Aker's reconstruction is wrong. It's a real shame that he didn't have time to put his research into publishable form himself. But as they stand, those articles don't make me feel inclined to junk the Revell kit. Anybody who'd followed my rants about the Revell Beagle and the Heller Soleil Royal knows that I'm not normally in the habit of defending plastic kit manufacturers, but it's only fair to acknowledge when they do something right. I think what we're looking at here are two legitimate interpretations of the same, extremely meager contemporary evidence.