Yes, spaceports appear with 0 hp as soon as you order construction. Fun fact: sector AI builds spaceport on sieged worlds infinite number of times (as long as it has minerals). Of course you are the one getting "spaceport under attack" message.
bump: Did anyone managed to find a way to mod out a hard penalty to diplomatic options for difficulty (-25/-50)? Thats additional 250-500 opinion needed. Making any diplomacy options on 'impossible' trully impossible.
Hold on, what? My impression so far is that I'm the one who needs to build the spaceports and that I'm the one responsible for upgrading them. None of my sectors have been doing it on their own.
On a semi-related question, just how is one supposed to build up a large surplus of minerals? It's easy to build up EC since planetary power generators produce obscene amounts of it and almost nothing uses it except as upkeep (Paradox may want to look at Eternal Space for ideas - some additional abilities that cost EC to use could be cool). Mineral mining, on the other hand, just seems to constantly lag behind. Even when your mineral production is much higher per month than your EC, you need minerals for
everything.
Want to build mining stations? You need minerals. Need more EC to build more mining stations? You need minerals. You need to fight some space amoebas to gain access to a new system which hopefully has more resources? You need minerals. And then once the amoebas are gone you need to either colonize a planet or build an outpost station, either way, you need minerals.
I'm probably playing this all wrong, but for me it's a constant struggle to put just enough minerals together to keep moving forward, at least if you want to stay in the tech race or not run into an EC deficit. I have a fairly good-sized empire, with dominion over a fairly large swath of space and 7 planets (all but one of which are within sectors), yet my mineral production is somewhere in the 50s. I just lost most of my fleet against a much smaller empire (that somehow is more advanced than me despite having just one planet and a presence in only 4 systems, none of which have much in the way of research bonuses), and now I can't possibly rebuild it before those damn space slugs manage to wreck my infrastructure and my vassal.