As you can see from the screenshot the smaller ships' images are not being cropped here like they would be on a canvas, I used shpGetImageDesc to provide the list used to draw the images. The same thing happens with small stations.
Would be very cool if the images adjusted their size accordingly. I remember running into this problem long time ago... images not made for dockscreens (all but items) just don't work very well.
You can always try using resCreateImageDesc to see if you can make something snazzy yourself?
The too big ones aren't so bad. What's happening now is pretty good. Scaling would be better for the big ones, but the top left corner is good enough for most stations. Probably everything except the Teratons, and for all but a few ships as well. A CSC, or Phobos will crop badly at some angles, but anything smaller should be okay.
It's the ones that need more cropping that are the problem.
I expected that when I define an image as being 48 pixels wide and 48 pixels tall, for example, for the image to be 48 by 48 pixels, not a mashup of a bunch of different objects because the edge didn't get cropped.
Feeding resCreateImageDesc the image of the desired objects made no change at all. Centering them helps a bit, but doesn't solve the cropping problem.
The screenshot was from a test version of the Captain's log, now on xelerus.
For me it would be good enough if the smaller images were just cut off at the specified image dimensions, but a function for scaling images would be nice too.