I'm kindof in the same boat as you (pun fully intended
)
I recently started looking for any kind of kit I could find for an Australian destroyer my girlfriends father served on during the vietnam war, being an australian ship there was most likely not going to be a kit of it, however I did manage to find one, but not in a scale I was happy with... so I decided to try my hand at design and build from scratch, using paper/card model design techniques.
After contacting a few ex-servicemen's associations outlining what I wanted to do, I was flooded with offers of support. Now, a few weeks later, I have a full set of the actual plan drawings of the ship from the navy's archives, in the exact scale and configuration I was looking for (1:96).
The only problem I have now is turning those plans into a 3D model. I'm not sure if I'm capable of actually turning the plans into the 3D model I need, but I'm reading some tutorials I found on this forum and I'll see how I go.
I'd reccomend trying to get in touch of some veterans associations that are closely or directly related to the ship in question and the men who served on her... those kind of guys seem to be very helpfull and friendly when it comes to helping someone recreate a model of something so close to their past etc.
The plans I recieved were the actual plans used to build the ship. The guy who sent them to me works for a company who still build naval ships today, and he has a mate who makes prototype and display models of all types of ships, he happened to have just completed his 4th model of the same ship class I was looking for (Daring class destroyer).
Good luck with your search, I hope you have as much luck as I have so far.
