I'll jump in and hijack to answer part of this. I've never finished a ship, but I have done a few waterline hulls with decks, and yes the egg-crate frame can be made pretty strong from plain card. I got started with Wilhelmshavener kits and that is the assembly method they used for all the ships I've tried. The aircraft carrier I built in high school was fairly high, and I could set like 10 pounds or so on it.
The recent Lutjens that sits 1/2 finished on my shelf took a bunch of the weight of my 15 lb. cat a couple times when I left it out working on bits and he walked across it.
It was when I got back into card modelling last year that I ran across framing anything with extra layers of card. It works, but you can do a lot and get pretty strong structures without it depending on the design.
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-Dan
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