Matthew,
Record Group 19 is where you will find ship plans. Some of these plans are on microfilm, but apparently they also have some blueprint sheets. I have obtained many reels of microfilm working over the Internet.
If you have a specific ship or class of ship you are interested in you should email the Archives (see the contact page) and inquire about it. Tell them you are interested in plans in record Group 19 and give the name of the chip or class.
Three things you should remember:
1. It is unlikely the Archivist that responds is a model ship builder, or even very familiar with ships and ship plans. SO you have to be very specific about what you are interested in and explain in detail. They can't read your mind.
2. You aren't the only person submitting a request - they get a lot of requests and there are few Archivists. Expect a delay of up to a month before you get a reply.
3. An Archivist is allowed to spend only a little time (30 minutes I have been told) on any request. If it takes longer than that to find the information you want you must hire a researcher or go there and search for yourself.
Having said that, I have gotten excellent help over the Internet. The Archivists I have worked with have given me the exact microfilm reel numbers for the blueprints of ships I have inquired about (the entire Cleveland class). They have provided me with lists of the ships' histories. Most importantly, they have provided me with exact instruction for ordering copies of each item. All this without ever leaving my home.
****
There are a few things you should know about ship plans on microfilm.
1. There are virtual "reels" and physical reels.
A ships plans will be listed as RG19 Reel XXXX - record Group 19 reel number XXXX. This will be a virtual reel, where "reel" just means a record number. Each virtual reel may actually contain one or more physical reels of microfilm. For example, the blueprints for the USS Cleveland are on virtual Reel 5537. In actuality there are 19 physical reels of microfilm containing 4630 blueprints.
For the entire Cleveland class there are four virtual reels, including changes made during WWII and plans from several shipyards. Each shipyard redrew some of the plans and made their own changes. All in all there are 36 physical reels of microfilm for the original Cleveland class ships. For the subsequent CLG conversions there are two more virtual reels with 19 physical reels. See this link for details:
http://www.okieboat.com/Microfilm%20notes.html2. Each virtual reel contains an Index that is a list of plans. Each actual blueprint is a "Frame" and the Index lists the drawing name and Frame number. On the film the Frames are in numerical sequence (Frame 1 to Frame N). When there are more than one physical reel (almost all cases) each successive physical reel contains some part of the total Frames in numerical order. For example the first physical reel may contain Frames 1 through 194, the second reel contains Frame 195 - 382, the third reel Frames 383 - 597, an so on.
This Index is essential for locating any particular drawing. In older pre-WWI plans each physical reel contains an index of the plans on that reel. So to get a complete list of all drawings you must order all of the physical reels. During WWII they started making a separate Index reel that lists all drawings on all physical reels. You can order this Index reel to see all of the plans that are available. Unfortunately, the Index reel list doesn't tell which physical reel a particular Frame might be on.
3. Each Frame may actually contain several images on the film. For blueprint sheets the images cover the vertical height of the 36 inch high sheet. Some sheets were small enough to be captured in a single image. Others, like the complete deck plans, hull lines, etc. were quite long and required up to 6 or 7 images to photograph the entire sheet. So these Frames contain multiple images. To recreate a single drawing you may have to paste together multiple images in an image editing program.
For things like door lists, key lists, etc. the originals were typed pages and each page was photographed as a separate image. So each Frame is a single image.
The Index doesn't tell how many images are included in each Frame.
4. The RG19 drawings are from the Bureau of Ships (BUSHIPS) and contain drawings only of the ship's structure and the engineering plant. They do not include any of the Bureau of Ordnance (BUORD) drawings for weapons. The BUSHIPS drawings do contain things like armor plating and turret structure - everything needed to build the physical structure of the ship and get it launched.
Ordnance drawings are in two other Record Groups (if they exist).
5. Not all of a ship's blueprints are included in the Archive's records. Many of the Cleveland class blueprints are missing. Each existing blueprint contains a list of related drawings, and I have found that many of these referenced drawings are not included on the microfilm. In some cases essential drawings are missing. My guess is that more than half of the Cleveland class drawings were not copied and are lost.
Some of the images that are on the microfilm are badly exposed and unreadable. All images contain some photographic distortion, especially spherical distortion, that makes pasting multiple images together more difficult.
Some drawings were modified with time, so several versions of the same drawing may be available. So the first one you come across may not be what was actually used to build the ship.
The first ship of a class was designed in a particular shipyard. The drawings were made in pencil on paper. These were copied as blueprints in a crude WWII vintage copying machine. These blueprint copies were actually used at the construction sites. The microfilm images may be of the original drawings or of a blueprint. The original drawings produced clearer images on the microfilm. Some of the blueprint images are badly blurred.
When multiple yards built the same class of ship each yard would hand copy each original drawing from the original yard, using tracing velum overlaid on the original drawing. Then, in the new yards the drawings may have been modified. So each shipyard may have been using a different set of plans to build ships of the same class.
For example, in the Cleveland class I have found that each yard constructed a particular large conspicuous feature differently (the trash burner smoke pipe). The tops of the smoke pipes were constructed differently in different yards. These differences are very obvious in photographs if you pay attention. Very few modelers have noticed this, so many models are inaccurate.
6. Some of the drawings were just wrong! It was impossible to build the real three dimensional object using the plans on the two dimensional drawing sheet. I found several instances of this in the Cleveland class drawings - typically one pipe passing through another pipe. When this happened the shipbuilders improvised.
7. Most of the drawings are for internal plumbing, electrical wiring, lists of doors, keys, name plates, furniture, etc. Very few of the thousands of blueprints for the Clevelands actually contain information useful to the ship modeler.
8. After ships were commissioned they may have been modified, so the ships changed with time and those changes aren't shown in the original drawings. The drawings for these changes may not have been preserved.
And, of course, the crews on the ships often got out the torches and "fixed" problems in the original designs or added new features.
So you need to examine photos of the ship (or the real ship) to see how the thing was actually built.
Phil
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