This is interesting. It's pretty clear that the first and third of Michel's photos show the same kit in different boxes. I'm not sure what the one in the middle is.
The bible on the subject, Thomas Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits, lists only one H.M.S. Victory. It was originally released in 1959, in the box that's in the uppermost of Michel's photos. (The box art is unmistakeable. The artist showed the sails secured to the footropes rather than the yards - pretty funny, if you think about it a little.) The original kit number was H-363. Dr. Graham says it was on the market under that number from 1959 through 1970. He only lists one reissue: in 1972, with the same kit number. (The book only covers the period through 1979, however, and only covers the products of Revell of the U.S. - not Revell Germany.)
I think the Revell kit got pirated by other companies at least twice. (I say "pirated" without any real knowledge of what was going on. There may have been some perfectly legal arrangement - though I rather doubt it.) Some Japanese firm apparently developed a set of molds that were somewhat crude copies of the Revell ones; that kit was sold for a while in the U.S. under the UPC label. (I assume it had some other label in Japan. UPC, to my knowledge, didn't actually make models; it reboxed other companies' merchandise for U.S. distribution.) And, as we discussed in another thread recently, there was the odd Lindberg Victory. I only have vague memories of it, but it looked suspiciously like a "pantographed-down" version of the Revell one. Many of the details looked remarkably similar - the whole kit was considerably smaller. (Lindberg did at least two other kits that appeared to be shrunken Revell ones: a Bounty and a Flying Cloud. The latter even had the little coils of rope molded into the decks in the same positions as the Revell kit had them.) The freakish thing about that little Lindberg Victory, though, had to do with its transom and quarter galleries. I'm writing this on the basis of thirty- or forty-year-old memory, which may well be defective, but I'm pretty clear in my recollection that the kit only had two rows of stern windows. I recall that because I recall trying to make the kit into a waterline version of a 74-gun ship, by chopping off the lower deck and leaving the stern as-is.
I can suggest three explanations regarding the middle photo in Michel's post. One - Revell Germany has actually issued a Victory kit that's different from all the others that have appeared under the Revell label. (That's certainly possible.) Two - it's actually the same kit as the one in the other two boxes. Three - that old Lindberg kit has somehow made its way into the Revell fold. That seems like the least likely explanation, but it would be worth taking a look at the box contents. If the thing has two rows of stern windows....
Actually Theory #2 makes a lot of sense. The people running these companies are notoriously casual in their approach to scale. The Revell catalog over the years has contained plenty of ridiculous errors regarding scale. I don't have the kit in front of me to measure, but that figure 1/146 (or 1/150) almost has to be wrong. In those days Revell was making its sailing ships to fit a standard-sized box. The original Constitution and Victory kits were packed in identically-sized boxes, and the finished models were almost exactly the same size (about 18"long). Dr. Graham's book lists the Constitution as being on 1/192 scale. That makes sense. (1/192, or 1/16"=1', is a standard scale. The Constitution was the first sailing ship kit Revell made; it seems reasonable that the standard box size might have been initially that way. And an 18"-long model of the Constitution would indeed be on about 1/192 scale - half the size of Revell's 36" kit, which is on 1/96 scale.) There's no way a model of the Victory can be on a LARGER scale than a Constitution of the same length. (1/225 seems a little small - but it's entirely possible that both are mis-labelings of the same kit. I think the errors, whatever they may have been, may have crept in when somebody saw a figure in book for the "overall" length of the ship and assumed that the figure in question included the bowsprit - which it almost certainly didn't.)
Most interesting stuff. I guess the only way to resolve the mystery is to get hold of the actual kits and compare the contents of the boxes.