Lee, I used the "Anatomy of The Ship: HMS Dreadnought" as the sole guide to making my hull for that vessel.
Clearly you have to be very careful when scaling up small images in a book to the scale you're aiming for: an error of
1mm measured on (for example) a cross-section at 1/384th scale will become a
fifth of an inch fault at 1/72nd scale. If each of your frames ended "off" by this amount (in all directions) you'd be in trouble from the start.
You
can minimise these errors, however - and I would strongly recommend you do the following:
Redraw the hull, in plan and elevation, at 1/72nd scale.
This is not so off-putting as it might sound. Bear in mind that the original frames were placed in Imperial measurements - the Dreadnought's were in 3-feet and 4-feet spacings. This gives you a great sense of where major items (turret centres, funnels, superstructure, portholes)
have to fit.
Draw (and tweak, and then tweak again) the waterlines that you have taken from the smaller-scale cross-sections onto the 1/72nd scale plan. Smooth the curves. Try taking off elevations from these waterlines to test the cross-sections.
When you're happy (and you'll know the Hood inside out if this takes you as long as it took me with the Dreadnought) you can use the cross-sections as the basis for your model's frames/bulkheads. Best way to do this is to draw the cross-sections and then
remove from the outside the thickness of the plating you'll be putting on.
I'm sorry I didn't document this part of the process more when I was preparing my hull build - a mere 88" to the Hood's 143".
