My first instinct is to have a type of station that can be built from sections/pieces both internally and externally.
What I mean by that is that the process would work something like this for the external appearance:
- Picks a docking area section (Model)
- Optionally attaches a ring or other surrounding piece (Model)
- Move backwards and attaches other segments (Models)
- Repeat for some number of sections/segments perhaps depending on population and tech level.
- Decorate by attaching models to tagged locations on the models chosen above
This would require rendering many more models for a single station externally and internally but I don't think it would be too burdensome