Are there any Honor Harrington (David Weber) fans around?

The attached image of a "Dreadnaught" has several shots of a model I created in SolidWorks (an engineering CAD package) and a shot of the new and improved version that I'm starting to build in Maya.

I created a test texture map with AliasSketchbook and got it correctly placed on the model, but am now stuck with very limited understanding of creating GOOD displacement and texture maps. The spaceship is supposed to be almost a mile long, so surface detail is going to be very important in conveying a sense of scale and I can't figure out how to achieve this. All of the detail in the SolidWorks model was actual geometry -- SolidWorks deals only in solids, so such detail in the geometry is expected and does not carry Maya's performance penalties. I tried importing the model to Maya from IGES and it came in looking great...at just over 300,000 polygons... Time to start over.

I've seen a lot of tutorials on texture placement or using something like DeepPaint3D, but is there anything out there for those of us using only Maya and Photoshop?