Simple scramble order from 'Scotty' would suffice. It doesn't make sense to think that each and every of my 53 ships has people on them 24/7 as I'd be paying more money a month than I earn for their wages.
Also - if you think about it - it'll take more than 30 seconds to disengage the capsule, drop out the vessel, move it then slide into another ship. Maybe 5 minutes would be a better estimate.
Station contents would be somewhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 dependent on station size with a predominantly roaming population. You'd only need 50,000 crew to run the station's systems and other general sanitation stuff - with another 10,000 bodies to run stores for supplies, bars etc.
Including personnel, merchants and families... 75,000 permanent inhabitants for a small station, maybe?
But, that doesn't answer the planet-side inhabitants.
Terraformation would take around 500-2,000 people including the camp follower types (cooks, maintenance, sanitation etc.) with planetary populations anything from a few thousand to billions. There are a lot of planets in the New Eden cluster that can, do, and could possibly hold people.