Well, we've taken to 3D printing the submarine designs produced in the short course in plastic (with interiors in some cases), and also the winning MSc ship design group each year get their design printed in steel or cast in pewter (using a 3D printed master).
The issue is that the ship design software has something of a casual disregard for the usual limits on facet aspect ratios etc so it produces very poor geometries that require a lot of editing, so we are somewhat limited. It's faster for me to remodel it in Truespace (old, but produces rock-solid geometries it seems) but again that comes down to hours of work and this is about 15 minutes...
We also have a scheme to print the general arrangement onto the decks, so there is some method to the madness here. :-)
RP1