![]() The hull does have a period rounded stern, so thats in its favor. But the rest will go easily enough, and you can build a head from styrene that will improve it slightly, although the hull will still be off. ![]() It terms of construction, the Santa Maria has a very tricky main deck, which will want major fiddling to get right. If you were to build any of them, go for the Nina, which "does the least harm" in that it has the least number of problems and has the greatest number of consistancies with what we know of vessels from the period. They might share the same hull, but there are additions to make the two distinct from each other. The Heller Nina and Pinta are less anachronistic, although the Pinta has ridiculous baulstrade railings and an exaggerated bow. The best thing to say about it is that scholarship was still in the learning curve 80 years ago, but that does not help the model. The hull form is bizarre, the upperworks do not resemble contemporary 15th century images (but do resemble 1920s ideas of old time ships), and most significantly, it does not have a head. The Heller Santa Maria is based on an obsolete 1920s reconstruction, riddled with serious errors. Since we don't know what the original hulls looked like, it's not fair to say that either of them is "wrong." Personally, I wouldn't want to put the two of them on a shelf side-by-side, though. In many cases the results were pretty silly looking, but these two aren't so bad. Heller was notorious for recycling hulls in those days. One big point that's worth remembering: the Nina and Pinta kits use the same hull. But an experienced modeler probably could turn any of them into an eminently respectable model. The hull forms are reasonable they don't feature a great deal of sophisticated detail (the small boats they carry call out for some additional work, for instance), and the rigging instructions, of course, are extremely simplified (as are the rigging instructions of almost all plastic sailing ship kits). About all I feel confident in saying is that the Heller versions look believable. Those people tend to be at each other's throats in terms of what's "accurate" and what isn't. Quite a few researchers have published reconstructed plans for Columbus's ships over the years. I haven't seen the three Heller kits "in the flesh" in quite a few years, but my recollection is that they're reasonable kits for their time (the mid-1960s). ![]() This is a complicated question - mainly because so little is known about the three actual ships in question.
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