"Valiant's Spanish Main Range: Ship Types" Topic

Looking at picking up some fleets from this range and not sure what some of the ship types are supposed to represent. I know the basics: caravel, carrack, galleon, race-built, etc. What is the difference between English man o ' war and royal galleons, what's the great ship, Spanish treasure and royal galleons? Thanks!

Painting mine as we speak…..

The Spanish Royal Galleons are the biggest ships in the range, probably meant to represent the big galleons in the Squadron of Portugal

The Spanish Treasure galleons are smaller and are probably meant to represent the Squadron of Castile – the lighter armed ships that frequented the West Indies trade routes.

The English Great ships are the largest of the English and probably represent like Triumph and White Bear which were not true galleons – being beamier and heavier in the castles.

The Royal Galleons represent the larger non-racebuilt Galleons such as Elizabeth Jonas and Victory.

The English Man-o-War represent some of the smaller, older non-racebuilt galleons such as Hope and Antelope.

Note that it takes a discriminating eye to tell these apart on the table as they all share the same sail set and gallery piece.

Wow. That's some really good info there. Many thanks as I've looked at those ships on and off for many years but my ignorance kept me from making the plunge.

I Have been purchasing and working on painting up this line for a while now, and intended to get around to posting my interpretation since I have wondered this myself in the past! Valiant's top-down shots aren't of much use.

The hulls are nicely detailed and very accurate to the more reliable period interpretations.

The downside is the occasional casting shows a bit more mold wear than is acceptable (I have two Spanish Royals out of the same pack that look like one came from the same mold several hundred castings apart!).

Also, the masts are only cast in a few sizes, so I ended up swapping them out between ships (and cannibalizing and converting the masts from the 1:2000 Nappy ships I ordered as samples) to get them to look right. The Spanish treasure ships and Spanish Royal Ships came with the same mast sets- they're not even close to compatible.

Also, IMO, the great ships seem to have too low of freeboard, and sloping to the rear (maybe to fit in the mold better?); I glued and shaped a piece of plasicard to the bottom to correct this. This also makes them more properly high-built and imposing.

IMO, VSB's guide is spot on- though I assert that the Victory would more likely be a carrack . I used the pics of the line he posted here some time ago to try and decipher "what was what" myself- there really aren't a lot of pics of these ships to be found online. VSB's, and these are all the profile pics I could find:

link

I will post more later today.

I was going to post more pics but I don't think there is a point. While the two types of Spanish Galleons are easy to tell apart and the English Greatship is obvious (big, beefy and three pasts) the racebuilts, the English man-o-war and the English Royal galleons are almost indistinguishable as they are all about the same size, all are four-masters, have the same cut and have the same deck arrangement.

The Royal galleon is a tad longer than the other two – two mm if that. Still hard to pick out of a crowd.

The racebuilt and the man-o-war are near impossible to distinguish. There MIGHT be slightly different dimensions on some of the deck hatches, but we're talking .25 mm on any dimension. The beakhead of the racebuilt MIGHT curve up a bit more, but that might be an optical illusion. The best way I found to tell them apart was to look at the bottom – the waterline aft is slightly more rounded on the racebuilt.

What is the difference between the English royal galleon and the Spanish royal galleon. On the Valiant website they have the same photos.