The plans remain unavailable on the original site to due hacking, but Dreadnought Project has made a copy of some of them, available hereI found this while poking around for French info on the remains of SMS Thuringen.
Basically it seems that the the French equivalent of the NMM has scanned a lot of ship plans (original drawings with lots of info) and made them available online in TIFF format at no charge.
Trawling through the list of all types of ships, the following battleships have plans available:
Pre-DreadnoughtBouvet, Massena, Jaureguiberry, Charlemagne, St Louis, Gaulois, Iéna, Suffren, Liberte, Justice, Verite, Democratie, Danton, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Vergniaud
DreadnoughtJean Bart, Courbet, Paris, France, Lorraine, Bretagne, Provence, Bearn (as aircraft carrier)
Post WW1 BattleshipClemenceau, Jean Bart, Richelieu
Amazing number of plans and incredible detail. Even if you don't know French it's pretty easy to navigate. I did find that not all battleships have the same type in French, some are Bâtiment de ligne, some Cuirasse and some Cuirasse d'escadre, I'm not sure of the difference.
Each ship has a "microfiche" index pdf page detailing the different plan sheets available and their filenames.
To give an idea of the quality, I just downloaded the first file for Jean Bart (Courbet class) and the image is 16476 x 5659 pixels at a resolution of 200picels per inch, making it approx 82" x 28" if you were to print it out with no resizing.
This is making me think seriously about scratch-building a french dreadnought as well as Royal Navy, USN or German Imperial Navy subjects.
Why can't the NMM do something like this???
Edit: Forgot to paste the link :heh:
http://www.servicehistorique.sga.defense.gouv.fr/02fonds-collections/banquedocuments/planbato/planbato/listebato/listebato.phpEdit January 20 2020: another possibility is this Internet Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120113075 ... as/rec.php