Ponies In The Stable

Until the assignment of several Ranger class scouts to the Starbase 37 patrol sector, it was a positive rarity for Starstation India to handle multiple ships within the enclosed docking slips of its primary pier groupings.  However, the smaller stature of these newly refit reconnaissance craft makes it an advantageous pairing when more than one is in port.  It also makes for a fine show all along the station's surrounding concourses and observation ports.  Here, the USS Mustang has arrived shortly after her sister, the USS Strider has docked, and the port's extendable gangways have been fully retracted to help accommodate both vessels.

I've wanted to properly gauge the scale of both versions of this model (in regards to this station) for some time now.  Of the two images I have ever rendered of a Ranger class in port, both made this difficult: one having been slightly too large and the other simply sharing too little background structure to help grasp any accurate contextual scale.  Though I frequently used drawings and precise point-location positioning while building models, to my chagrin, I rarely tend to build them from the bottom up using any outright scale reference.  All too often, I just start throwing primitive polygons together in the hope that I can even remotely bend them into a desired shape that reflects any reference I might employ.  Scaling tends to be something I end up fixing closer to completion (which I never reach anyway ).

However, I was able to accurately scale both of these vessels using the diameter of the standard docking rings, present on both the ships and the station.