Just back from "short" duty in the Guard. Now I can get back to work on my scale ship project. I have always had a major interest in transatlanic liners and have nearly all available plastic kits from over the years (I'm pushin' 40). I spent four years on an aircraft carrier while in the Navy in the 80's and knew one day I'd get around to doing a large scale ship.
After a cruise onboard the SS Norway, formerly the SS France, I set out on my project from scratch. While on the ship, I wandered around off limits spaces looking for a shipboard fire station - knowing a profile view drawing would be near. I found one in 200th scale but it was behind plexiglass and the passageway was only three feet wide so I couldn't get a good shot with the camera. I took a series of eight close-up shots on a tripod and merged them in photoshop when I got home. I went to Kinkos and enlarged the image to 128th scale on an engineering copier. I used cross section stations taken from my SS France plastic model - knowing where the inaccuracies were in that model, I made the necessary changes to the profiles.
A few months after I began, I found a set of incredibly accurate drawings from a guy in France.
Before I left for duty, I was making pretty quick progress. Go to my web page I have set up documenting the progress if you're interested:
http://www.geocities.com/nclssnorway/ssnorway.html
I may be moving toward the summer so I'm afraid it'll be a while yet, before I can really get back to it.
Best of luck on your ship modeling projects.
Tom Hoffmann