I bet you are right, Garry - in fact I am so sure of it that I won't even ask my younger-brother-who-designs-warships-for-a-living for his thoughts. I only know about railways meself, but it certainly happens there, too.
Maybe we need to explain to younger viewers that there was no CAD software in them days. Everything had to be hand drawn, by highly skilled draughtsmen; "persons" hadn't been invented then either. If you already had an effective design for a part of a ship, like the bridge or the rudder, you scaled the drawings up or down with an adjustable device called a pantograph. Same thing for aircraft. That's why so many older H-P and de Havilland aircraft have a distinct family resemblance about the tail area.
Some of the old-style engineering drawings are truly works of art. So is the computer modelling of SS Nomadic.
Mind you, with all those polygons, I wouldn't try to sail it in FS anywhere near Heathrow
MikeW