Hab mods and Boarding pods are what you'll need for boarding defense. Ground troops are only for ground, unfortunately.

Love it when they blockade a planet and you warn them and they're just like, "We have no idea what you're talking about." Well okay then, guess you won't miss this fleet then.

I design the private sector ships myself, so not sure if the automated will add the warp drive or not. Could always just play a quick game with cheap tech cost to see if the automatic update will add it.

They're not going to get happy from you forcing them to pay you protection money...

It still takes resources. Its not like its just free money. You're boosting your money while crippling your supplies. Doesn't really seem worthwhile to me.

I've just started skipping over any response from paShadoWn. They're always full of some other video game quote and snide remarks on DW that aren't really effective criticism.

I use the "automatically upgrade" to change the components to latest ones. As far as I've noticed they don't change anything else. It usually keeps the number of components too so I go in and manually lower reactors and stuff if needed. That's key though, always go back and check.

Nice and surrounded it looks like hehe.

It's probably not as quick of a solution as you'd like, but you can set a pirate mission to deliver all resources to the colony. It still takes some time, but it'll actually get your new colony supplies instead of waiting on out of fuel private sector ships.

Gift it to an ally or if it's really horrible, gift it to an enemy?

<t> I would also like to add that rapidly expanding brings a bunch of maintenance costs. You have to factor in defense fleets, if any; new spaceports costs, if any; troops that aren't doing anything on a planet you just took, setting up mining stations in the systems you took, etc. Rapidly expanding ...