Bobby,
If I were making the distributed control system for this 1/144 scale war ship I would use RS485. With low average packet rate, but a high baud rate you can virtually eliminate the need for simultaneous operation over several bus segments. Other protocols in my opinion are just too complicated and hefty for a local distributed bus like you are talking about.

I wrote a fairly lengthy diatribe on a simple RS485/RS422 protocol scheme here in an earlier forum post.

Good Luck.

Michael Karas

PS...Note: Please correct me if I was wrong. I read that you wanted a local control bus structure. I think I saw quite different from Jez in the previous post where it seemed that he thought you were trying to make a boat to boat control system.
MJK