I'm not sure you need the manual and an education from that era. When I've read everything I can find about a subject it's surprising how much you can understand. The challenges are often that so many of the systems are kinda uninteresting (gland steam pressure on a turbogenerator for example), only used in specific circumstances (fire control panels) or duplicated (ship controls often have 4+ controls which turn the azipods, not to mention the repeated controls on the bridge wings).

The last time I deducted too much time to this endeavour I started to understand the ballast controls on a O-class submarine...