Had some time to play again so I've got a game update.
I am now officially allied with the Banard Star guys.
I did bump the Neutromium some to speed up getting out there. I've finally gotten some grave survey ships built and currently have 26/30 points surveyed in Sol. One of them leads to the hostile alien system (there is a habitable planet in there). Just peeked and jumped out again. I'm calling them Guam because of their flag.
The Guam aliens came in again twice, but just three small ships (6700 tons each) each time and I was able to easily destroy them using my PDC and small fleet. They appeared to be energy armed, no missiles, and my only loss was one of the 12 laser gunboats I sent after the first group. The second Guam group I just used missiles on and had no losses.
With my warp point survey not quite complete, another set of aliens appeared in Sol through a WP I haven't found yet. I'm calling them the Gorillas for now (cuz that's their picture). These guys had 9 warships (or armed survey ships).
They headed straight for Earth. I destroyed them all but at least three of them were missile shooters (I'm thankful my crude anti-ship missiles out ranged their faster ones). 4 missiles got through my anti-missile fire (mostly my one PDC (called Cheyenne Mountain), but also 2 destroyers in orbit) and hit the PDC with four 5 pt warheads. Armor took it all (though Colorado Springs is likely gone). Another missile hit a passenger liner that was in Earth orbit.
When those five got through I upped my point defense shooting from 2v1 to 3v1. Burned through my ammo faster in a scary fashion. When the last Gorilla missile was shot down my two defense DDs were long out of ammo, and my PDC was down to just 5 defense missiles. Yikes!
I now have a four light cruisers with anti-ship missiles, and I would like to go out to meet the aliens in the future, but the problem is that the warp points that both Guam and Gorillas came through are so close to Sol that Earth is in almost range of the enemy as soon as he jumps in for about half of the year.
Another issue is that the Banard Star aliens haven't been very active recently. They appear to be out of Duranium. Their system has zero now according to the Geo Status tool and they haven't set up any mining colonies in Sol (I am swimming in Duranium).
Is there a way I can send them some? I have tried looking but I don't see one. If not I may just starting running freighters over to them and edit the database to move the numbers.
This does sound like a very fun campaign 
. I can't think of a way to transfer Duranium to an NPR. For another human player you could sell it on the planetary market (assuming that window still works as I haven't touched it in a long while) but NPRs don't use the market (yet). One option might be to create a small mining colony on one of the Sol bodies with lots of Duranium and then transfer ownership to the NPR. If you leave a pile of Duranium at the colony before you transfer ownership, that Duranium will get moved to the NPR homeworld
Steve
You have the Foreign Aid window, could you add mineral transfer as an option? Although, you would then need a mechanism of actually transporting the minerals, or components.
What if he created a freighter, filled it with minerals, moved it to the aliens homeworld and then transferred ownership, would the NPR know to unload the freighter?
