Part One: Gathering the Data and Producing Blueprints

The first thing you need to do is to do your homework. It’s critical that you get the facts right before you start commiting time and plastics to a ship that might otherwise turn out wrong.
Since War at Sea uses miniatures that are made to scale and are in general quite good and correct (except Zara which is a Pola *cough* ) it is imperative that you start out with finding the correct dimensions and preferably some plans for your project.

Caio Duilio

Sources

I have a few sources that I turn to when I’m planning a new boat. Generally I start off by skimming Wikipedia or Google for interesting looking ships or ships that might prove useful to my fleet. Wikipedia sometimes also has some pretty good data on the ships I look at, if nothing else some good stories about it’s service life. Pictures and plans you will not normally find at Wikipedia. You need more specialized sites for that.

My main go-to site is this one: Warships of WWII

It’s not completely translated into English, but it has data on most any type of vessel you choose to build. A lot of the time you can find plans or side/top views that’ll prove extremely useful when you get to the next step; producing blueprints.

Another good site: Warship Database

Not nearly as comprehensive as Warships of WWII, but it has color plates of a lot of ships which you’ll find useful when you get to the last step; painting. They also have blueprints and sometimes color photos which are as rare as diamonds to a WWII camouflage sleuth.

An Example

Earlier this year I decided to make good use of the time between the release of set one and two of A&A: WaS to bolster my Italian fleet with a cheap battleship for 100-200 point battles. I shopped around at the sites above and found a ship that I liked, the Caio Duilio. She wasn’t rumored to appear in the second set so I felt confident that she’d be worth the effort to build.

Blueprints

First I wanted some blueprints or diagrams that showed her side on and from the top so I could get her dimensions and general layout right.

Plan views of the Andrea Doria Class

These I found at Warships of WWII.
If you can’t find good blueprints it’ll be a royal pain to get all the details and proportions right.

Dimensions

Next step is to find her dimensions so that I can produce a correctly scaled blueprint to use when I get to the actual building. Luckily these were available on the same page so I just note these and start calculating the scaled down length of the ship. Her length varies on this page, this is because she was rebuilt and modernized between the world wars. So for WaS we want the modernized figures.
So she is 186.9 meters long. Converting this into centimeters for the plans we’re going to print out we need to multiply that with 100;. 186.9*100=18 690. OK, good. Next step is to scale it down to WaS size. WaS ships are 1:1800 scale so you divide 18 690 by 1800; 18690/1800=10,38. So Caio Duilio is 10.4 cm long in the WaS world.

What I do next is create a document in inDesign and place the plueprint in it and scale it so that the length of the ship is 10.4 cm on the page. You can use any other type of software that allows you to set the exact size of the printed image of course. Just as long as you make sure that you get correctly scaled printouts you should get a correctly scaled down blueprint on your paper.

Colors/Camouflage Patterns

Thinking one step ahead here you’d like to know what colors your ship was painted in during the war. Many ships were painted in dazzling schemes to camouflage and decieve enemy spotters. A lot of ships also carried different type camos during different periods of the war so you may have several schemes to choose from. Do always try to get views of both sides of the ship as they tend to differ, Italian ships always had different port/starboard patterns.
Caio Duilio was a rather drab light gray at the outset of the war but was repainted with a snazzy dazzle camo later (41/42 I presume).

From Regia Marina dot Net

I found these images simply by doing an image search with Google. It’s worth noting that the best images can be found if you search for plastic kit models of the ship you want. If you’re lucky you’ll find something like the site above, or this one, which is as good as gold!