PS;-
The struts could be made from cocktail-sticks. Supermarkets also sell wooden skewers for kebabs which are very thin. Metal, - then use old knitting-needles, or brass or copper wire, which is easy to cut.
The tail just need two sawn slots in the arse end of the body and mandrel. Two sheets of Plasticard or similar for the fins, with opposing-slots to they lock together before fitting and are strong.
The rigging/wires etc. The trick here is to use thin elastic, so they wont look saggy and wobbly. You can secure the ends with ordinary pins, so no slack and no glue needed. If you need even finer.....then you can easily make yards by getting old bits of polystyrene plastic, as in Airfix kits, - and melting it and stretching it out. It cools and hardens in seconds. Snip to length with a knife and use a tiny blob of superglue applied with a cocktail stick to fix.
Surface texture;- After you have tissue-covered the foam, if you want to go a bit further, you could past-on some detail. Just cotton would be fine. After painting it'd be more blended-in. An alternative would be narrow strips of paper, similarly applied.
The reason I'd got some of these ideas to hand was that a while ago I'd thought of making a model of the R101. My parents both had memories of seeing this monster, and a friend of mine was pals with Bill Stryan, who was killed photographing the Memorial Service at the crash site at Bauvaise. My mother told me that generally, many kids were very frightened by the R101 as it made such a scary - to them - noise and it still sent a chill down her spine thinking about it in her final years.
The Government-built R101 was a sad tale - with an inevitable conclusion, as she was over weight, over budget and underpowered.
The privately-built R100, her sister ship was almost without problems, but was broken-up for scrap at Cardington, about a year after the R101 disaster, despite a sucessful trip to Canada and back. The R100 was also built to the same spec' as the R101, but was a different design, by the famous Barnes Wallace. Neville Shute-Norway's 'Slide Rule' is an excellent account of this saga.
R101;-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdPrUBkMgdE
Some shots of the R101;-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k60YoKKiayE
R101 and R34 too;-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0aoPm49axg