badwolf,
Nice work! A good quality printed manual is something that is really needed.
I might be able to help you by providing an alternative for the museum.
I made a script a while ago to extract the true height and length of the ships from the actual 3D data. As a side effect, I could draw the ship silhouettes with relative ease. I was able to add some texture mapping and edge drawing, and now I can automatically generate pictures that look a bit like hand drawn.
There are still some oddities, like every ships being armed to the teeth as well as some misaligned turrets, but I think these can be sorted out. Anyways, if you are interested, let me know.
A few examples:
