Not seeing it in action makes comments speculative of course.
My primary point is that a new empire on the stategic security side can't afford to be leaving breadcrumbs in the stars pointing home so until you expand outward some your primary colonization effort should be jump based not gate based. And even with the development of a core of gate linked worlds you would have the fringe be jump linked. Just consider the insane risk you are running otherwise, much like when in starfire an enemy gets your warppoint maps.
So long as you can colonize by jump ship I'll be happy it just looked like it would be impossible.
Ah as all the interesting fiction had the pre-TN start I thought I would give it a try. For campagin 3 I'll disable the blasted AI ships (even though I turned NPR chance down to 3% that was not enough). It is more than a few years since frankly 30-50 years are pretty much required to get your tech base installed and running, a good 20-30 of which are spent at home doing refits to your economy and ICBM bases. I think I will add ruins to the planet and modify the starting number of research stations somewhat to make it a lot less of a slog.
From the current pre-TN start campaign:
Year: 1370 Pop: 600 Conv. Ind: 600 Res.St: 2 Shipyard: 1/1 (500 T), 16 IBML, 6 LTA, 10 LTI
Year: 1411 Pop: 1320 Const: 265 Ord: 52 Fuel: 48 Mines: 238 Maint: 20 Res.St.:13//Pop: 26 Const: 5 Fuel: 1 Mines: 14 Res.St.: 2 plus: Shipyards 4/24 (max hull size 6k/5K/4K/3K), Ground Training facilities: 2 Civ Spaceport: lvl 10, Naval Academy: lvl 1, Planetary Sensors: 5//1, Mass Drivers: 1//1
Mining colonies AMines: 12//Amines: 7 Massdriver: 1//1
Fleet: 12 DD, 6 DDE, 11 DSSV, 6 GeoSV, 6 GravSV, 1 CS(200K colonists) , 5 FT (10K hold), 6 FT(30K hold), 1 TK, 6 TK(jump), 6 Terraformers, 2 TT(2 div cap)
PDC: 11 interceptor bases, 5 attack bases
Groundforces: 8 HQ, 5 HVA, 10 INF, 3 AST, 10 ENG, 9 GAR, 6 LTA, 6 LTI
This is probably similar to the start of a normal tech race.