You could try something like spore did, i think that would work well in this case.
That system wouldn't work very well with Star Ruler; it's complexities would essentially force us to cap the number of ships which can be in the game and so forth. Ships in Star Ruler are already very complex and complicated sets of data; adding another vast layer of complexity on top of that already complex system would slow the game down enormously principally because we let the players build as many ships as they would like.
Not that there's anything wrong with the system itself; it just wouldn't play nice with the engine (specifically in the context of this game) is all. Sorry! D:
If you're properly prepared, can you go all space gypsy? Strap engines to your industry, load up your population, and forsake planets until it's time to descend like locusts and strip mine another world?
Well, there is one major problem in the current build of the game with that: Workers cannot be put onto ships. That will likely change in the coming months and if that feature doesn't see 1.0 it'll be up shortly thereafter.
As a footnote: We intend to keep adding on to Star Ruler for a long time. The game will come out with very few bugs from what we're seeing from our beta testers so we hope to concentrate on fulfilling requests on the game and exposing things to the community to mod from Day-0 onward.
We would love to release Star Ruler with a list of features far exceeding what we're able to offer at the moment (**everything I've listed will be in, but we have a -lot- of features that weren't going to make it by June/July that we're keeping 'on the back-burner') as we simply lack the time, the team, and the money to do those features properly without 'rushing them in' at the last moment.