Hi There!
This may not apply to most,But i gotta say it. Have you tried ships larger than 1/200? By this I mean say H.O.(1/87 or N.Scale1/160.Of course these are Railroad scale along with the almost 1/48 Lionel. Now this is not for everyone. There is a problem here though.
If you want to do Tugs(Old or Newer Rail owned or associated types.) There is a problem. Walthers puts out a nice H.O. scale Tug in waterline and she is nice. Lots of opportunity for detailing and weathering. BUT she has a glaring flaw.The Rails on the upper deck(01 deck to you sailors) are brittle and cannot be bent as indicated in their instructions, without using the boiling water metal tube bending method. Even then some of the rail might break.
The same or similar rails can be bought from a company called Plastruct.(marketed at Hobby Shops)They are decent but the same applies here. Plus the ejection plug marks on the backside kind of ruin the quality of these. I do like their rails because of the fact that the stairs and stair handrails are really nice.
The reason I wrote this is there are models of Great Lakes Freighters out there floating around from a defunct company called Bearco. Their rail method would have the ship builders out there (Male or Female)looking like they used the "Rock's" barber. Yup, that Bad! I have built a lot of Vac kits and have been happy with most.Bearco ships weren't bad for the subject,but they were and are,If you find one, a real challenge even if you have done a Multi Engined bomber in any scale.