We are planning on having automatically generated "civilian freighters" used to transport population and resources about without direct supervision by the player. If this turns out to be too troublesome for pathing or combat, or too CPU-intensive, we can always fall back on a modified version of the "spaceport" system from Space Empires: if a colony has a spaceport, it can access the "global pool" of resources, otherwise it's limited to what it can produce locally! I doubt we'd go with a system where every colony is expected to be completely self-sufficient all the time!
