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[MajorTheRed]

So far the game is heavily hinted toward the threshold where you not just want a colony, but a colony with heavy industry, to produce your own weapons and ships. Once it's done, you are definitely falling in the later part of the game, cause once it's happened, you have a lot more stuff to consider and deal with in a big way, even if you don't want to (luddic path sabotage, expeditions, pirate activities). For my part, I think the game needs a less binary approach to ships building than "prior/after" having a colony with heavy industries. Here is a couple of suggestions to help "smooth" the transition between early and late game:
-Split weapons and ship production. Everything is about Heavy Industry. What about making another upgrade producing weapons? This would allow player to get some interesting weapons, but still having to get their ships from "third parties". Light industry with a "militaro industrial complex" upgrade for example.
-Introduce "tiers" for building ships. As a comparison, you don't expected European colonists building ships of the line or galleons just after they set up an outpost of a few thousands peoples. The size of available ships can be related to the size of the colony: Frigate with size 4 colony, destroyer with size 5, etc...
-Getting ships from other factions. If you have a commission, they could sell you ships depending of your relationships (one degree less than your current status). That means that Hegemony could provide you destroyer-size ships if you are friendly with them, but they would never ever give you an Onslaught on a large-scale even if cooperative.
That jsut some thoughts I got when playing my 20th game with the v0.9. I noticed that even when I don't want to play a colony game, sooner or latter I set up a colony to get a specific weapon or ship.

Not-completely related suggestion: in my last play I got numerous duplicate of ships blueprints. Would it make sense to make blueprints "stack" and improve the quality of this specific blue print? For example, my crappy colony is unable to produce better than 3 D-mods ships except for the Eagle cruiser that I got 3 blueprints and thus improving the knowledge of how to build it.

[Megas]

Once you build a colony, it will get attacked sooner or later even for no good reason.  (League attacking my colony for producing two fuel?!  It is blatantly obvious the game has a per year quota to send raiders at my colony.)

With nanoforges increasing Pather interest (like synchrotron) next version, there is no way around pathers if you want quality items and sufficient production (since Industrial Planning 1 no longer reduces demand).

Some sources of blueprints do not drop blueprints you learned.  You can find extras from salvaging, but raiding markets and tech mining cull out blueprints you already learned (and you get nothing in exchange).  You can probably get more duplicates by not learning the blueprint.

I do not want tiered progression as posted in the OP unless it truly stops all of the raiders and pathers.  Otherwise, it is too fiddly.  Blueprints are rare enough that there is already a de-facto progression.  I wish I could find all of the blueprints when I can build ships, but I end up doing magic-find runs blueprint raids late in the game to get missing blueprints.  By the time I build a Heavy Industry, I have pirate and ludd packs (yuck!), two to four of the basic tech packs, few of the elites from the tech cache mission, and maybe a few lucky finds from elsewhere.

[Histidine]

One idea I've had is for a "contract manufacturing" option where you can pay a friendly faction to produce stuff for you using your blueprints, for a fee.

[xenoargh]

I like the "contract manufacturing" idea.  With a grade in cost from --> Neutral or worse to --> loves you more than your mother.

I think that ship production should look like this:

1.  Being able to take D-mod clunkers you've... acquired taken from red-shirts you converted into protein-flakes and turn them into pristine Hulls for your fleets to use.  I think that any Colony should be able to do this, with a mechanic where the time / money it takes is directly related to the industrial power of the Colony (pop + Heavy Industry and so forth). 

It should be easy as putting ships into a special Storage-like location for your Colony (i.e., just a new tab, not a whole new UI) called "Convert" or "Repair Yards" or something.

When ships exit the Repair Yards, they're automatically set up as a Variant and included in the player's defense fleets for this Colony. 

This would fix a huge gripe with the current system, where I feel like capturing is largely irrelevant by midgame+.

2.  Buy stuff from outside, direct (and in BULK, if you BUY TODAY WITH CASH).  I.E., go talk to a Faction (preferably through the Comms interface for talking to Factions directly, which I presume is coming eventually) and offer to contract out for military or civilian ships.  The Faction / location should bring up a UI of what they're willing to sell you (which you should be able to influence with bribes, good behavior and threats, if they're a vassal) and you should be able to "buy" the hulls right then, but actual delivery will take a while.

3.  If you've got Heavy Industry up, it should be possible to directly inject cold, hard cash into that process to speed things up.  "I don't CARE what it costs!  I want that Cruiser YESTERDAY!" should definitely be a thing.  It should cost ridiculously-exponential amounts (say, 5X base purchase price) to make your local Shipbuilders Union drop everything else on their plate and get the work done fast, though.

4.  You should be able to adjust local tax / tariff rates to Make Stuff Happen faster, when you need to.  I like that the Economy doesn't feature much Guns and Butter nonsense, but that's something that's potentially Fun; adjust your War Economy to either pour in cash (that you'll spend tactically at a crucial Colony you need defended) or lower taxes to very low to encourage industrial output.

5.  You should be able to make weapons via a Light Industry upgrade or by pouring cash in (just ask Mattel about making M16's or the countless other weird situations where American consumer-goods firms have suddenly become military-goods purveyors).

6.