I'm the one who discovered this, back in 2003. Up to this point, no one had made any sense out of the markings. I felt they must reflect some real-world measurement, but it wasn't until I began corresponding with Richard Datin that I found the key to making sense of them. The numbers aren't perfectly situated, but they are too close to be accidental. One of the construction blueprints that Datin still had at the time gave real life scale measurements. This was not the final blueprint, but a preliminary one; and it was for a smaller ship design. This scale would have rendered the ship as finally built 540 feet in length. The final model, scaled per this preliminary blueprint, causes the numbered station markings to fall out as scale inches.
Here's my original image comparing the actual placement of the markings with their ideal locations.
M.