Re: We need one of these on the ISS
"A question for those in the know: is the scanner software able to identify individual (and perhaps partially hidden) components in the original, or do they have to be delineated manually?"
Good question. Obviously, a laser scanner can only see what's visible to it, but it's possible that there's a wide range of software that can "interpolate" hidden parts from the data it has. The Occam's Razor answer is that the video was a dramatization, and they had the full-up wrench data prepared carefully ahead of time. Kind of like all those cooking shows where the guy finishes assembling a complex recipe, then pulls the cooked version (prepared much earlier) out of a nearby oven. It's not really cheating in a demo film. I know for sure a printup like that takes a long time.