I have always had a liking for ships, warships and submarines and I have a private collection of roughly 5,000 paper plans, all catalogued, from some of the more recent Russian Warships of the 1990's in 1/100 scale, back to WW2 including a 1/100 set of SMS Bismark (19 pages in Polish) and to the first records of ships and ships plans, these plans collected from ex Communist Block magazines A4 and A3 - and - historic shipbuilding magazines, The Engineer, Engineering and others from about 1850 up to around 1920 in A3 sizes, when plans ceased to be printed in them, cataloguing the improvement and changes to ships and shipping over that period of time and before and quite a large collection of lithographs from these, above shipbuilding magazines - prior to the invention and use of the camera.
One of my favourites was a Roller ship, which I once built a large model of, and the Bessemer, which was a real cracker, but again, a failure - an English Channel Steamer, of I think, the 1880's, however, most of the plans I have collected, are as rare as the ships which they illustrate and which have been forgotten, in the main, by the passage of time.
I have also built a few large detail scale warship models, roughly 2 feet to 6 feet in length out of card and paper for R/C, although I've not bothered playing with them, beyond the build of each and I have them in my home, as I write this note.
The plans which I have, probably no longer exist, in many cases and the ships, especially over the period from the changeover from sail to steam, are in many cases most unusual and of course during the US Civil War, I have many of those, my favourite being the "Spyuten Dyuvil - 1865" which was a spar torpedo boat and which I once made a model of.
Richard