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Would be nice to have the real layout manual with 6 ships per page in the map view, with so many ships now, it would probably be quicker to find a ship, than the one in-game.
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Not just find but also compare

Sometimes it's just minor details which differentiate them visually despite having a different size.
In the manual shown in the picture above silhouettes are not black but coloured and with details.
You say you have started with the Bismarck but in my opinion it's teh merchants what needs to be done preferently. NYGM users now also have many new ships from Iambecomelife merchant's fleet mod and that itself is already a huge amount of new units.
Unfortunately we lack in SH3 a way to input directly the mast heigth we want to use instead of clicking the recognition manual

That forces you to find the proper match, while estimating would be much quicker -as in real life was done many times- and with some practice you can make very close guesses.