Royce - The thing is there are a lot of good options for defending your planets / outposts. Thing of building an outpost / colony like building a city or mining facility in real life. By default they don't really come with weapons. If you want there to be more than one turret per planet early on you can do that with mines / energy arrays / missile platforms, etc.
Similarly Colony ships / Outpost ships are more civilian ships imo. If you want them to have greater defense at all times you can fleet them up with some destroyers or some other offensive ship.
I do agree about the starting defense of colonies at least being the same as an outpost though so that's been corrected.
Catswift - Yeah, my RO multiplier was off - should be corrected now. The Trader / Warlord / Researcher balance over all is a separate issue that we'll need to address. The main goal here is to make sure that all the ships are balanced in terms of their strengths / weakness in addition to relative costs.