Okay, just checking in to see if I'm normal.
I was 6 years into a conventional start with a pop of ~500 or so, and I gave myself a couple extra research labs (16, I think?). I was tech level 1 or 2 in most everything, and didn't have any navy to speak of. Had colony ships running to a nearby world in the same system, and had found another 4 systems or so, one of which was inhabited.
I designed a recon frigate and sent it through (with a jump tender) to the inhabited world, then turned on my sensor. Sure enough, some of their ships came to take a look. As soon as I spotted them (at about 30m km?) I gave the order to jump out. 5 seconds later that ship was gone. About 12 hours later, 6 ships transit that jump point and blow up my jump tender, then start heading in-system for my colony. They blow up every ship in orbit, bomb the colony, then leave a trail of wreckage blowing up every ship along the line back to my homeworld, then destroy every ship in orbit of my homeworld, then leave. Which is fine, 'cause I had no navy.
6 ships, with missiles with 40,000k/s speed, and they were carrying enough that they didn't have to reload even once. If I had ONLY researched engine tech for the entire 6 years of that game, I still don't think I would've had the tech to make even just them missiles, let alone the rest of the ship.
So, the question is this: did I find an evil race of magical spoilery space gophers? Or do the NPRs start at Trans-Newtonian tech even when I start at Conventional? Or am I just really bad and am missing something? Unless I just got unlucky on what random things I found, I don't think there's a way I can do a conventional start without SMing myself a bunch of things along the way.