I finally have a good game going, with my first extra solar colonies up and running, and I've got a problem. I can't figure out a good way to transport minerals through jump gates. Mass drivers can't do it, there's no way to tell civilian shipping lines to do it, and I'm not sure how to set up my freighters to automatically carry minerals from the mining colonies to my factories. I've been just keeping careful track of all the minerals I'm mining and manually sending a freighter to pick them up, but there must be a better way. I can't imagine managing an empire as large as the ones described in the fiction section of the forum.
In a related question, there doesn't seem to be a good way to automate fuel harvesters either. If I use the "When fuel tanks full, unload fuel at colony" conditional order, they just go and unload at the nearest colony, which is practically guaranteed to be an auto mine, not some place I want lots of fuel.