Sand Pebbles

The movie version -- no, not really.

Iron Shipwright (made -- being re-mastered) a 1:192 scale resin & brass USS Panay Yantze-river gunboat.  It was attacked and sunk by the Japanese in 1937. It was a Spanish-American war vintage craft, like the fictional SanPablo, but didn't look anything like the movie representation.

The closest kit I have found is the Paper Shipwright Melik.   It was a river gunboat built in England and used by General Kitchner in his expedition to relieve Khartoum

http://www.papershipwright.co.uk/index.shtml

Paper kits are an interesting means of getting assistance in scratchbuilding a model of which no mass merchandise model exists.   Check the free downloadable demonstation models at the site.  The Civil War mortar raft is a quick & easy build.   The HMVS Cerberus is more complex but buildable using sheet plastic to replace the paper.

You can easily modify the paper kit to fit your specific ship. 

Okay, here's the stupid question of the day.  I'd never thought about doing this until just now.  I've built a couple of paper model airplanes, and they were okay.  (They actually flew great!) This paper shipwright chap, as well as a few other paper model dealers that I've looked at, offer CD's with the patterns on them, so you can print your own models. 

Some printers and copiers will feed sheet styrene up to .010 or even thicker.  What would happen if you were to print your model on plastic,  then, instead of just folding it, cut it out and glue it?  It probably wouldn't work for the details, but for large assemblies, I wonder if that could get a scratch building project off to a fast start.  Hmm...

I'm sorta hesitant to run a sheet of plastic thru the laser printer or copiers at work.  {I have run decal sheet with no problems ...}   I have tried running some thru the inkjet at home with no success.

I have printed some of the models from Paper Shipwright and Digital Navy, and have rescaled them to my preferred scale of 1:350.   I then glue the paper parts to the sheet styrene with some water soluable glue,  cut the parts, and glue the plastic pieces together with CA or Tenax.  

Its a good quick way of getting the shapes without carving them out of a solid block.

You can also soak the paper with CA and it will give it a plastic-like stiffness that you can build with.