I’m not certain but I think this is probably when a colony sends stats to a core world it loses some of the stats “decay” the further the planet is from the core world the more it loses. This ship seems to counteract this. Again I haven’t played them or I forgot I played them.

Yea, decay is something g in the GalCiv games that should probsbly be explained better for newcomers. It’s the amount of a given Resource you will lose due to the distance between where it is produced and where it will end up.  First introduced in GalCiv II.