The companies you can buy buildings/ships from. I mean, if they have enough production to build a ship overnight when it would take me weeks, why haven't they already taken over the galaxy?

Cause they need your money..and the thing is that they aren't probably the sole factor doing the construction. Imagine the buy option as a fact your temporarily hiring more workers for your ship project so it completes faster..much faster...ludicrously fast...
not to mention its convenient in case of impeding doom .

Wearing your rose-coloured glasses again aren't you?

I imagine the quick building is more about quickly aquiring and retrofitting an existing property. Private factories get augumented into large public ones, a mercenary ship is bought and brought up to spec....

?A possible reference to Elton John? I don't know.

But let's face it,would you just sit around and get eaten alive by Korath or die fighting them? (Remember to wear your gasmasks!  )

I can only build a ship from scratch near a planet, but I can pay a company to upgrade said ship in just one week, wherever it is in the galaxy. And, I can't choose to upgrade the ship myself, even if it's orbiting a planet with shipyards.

These magical construction companies have tons of info on ships and techs, I bet. I wanna put my spies in their ranks...

If I were fighting in the "Hey, we don't want to get completely overrun by the Korath" army, any Earth-based company that made gasmasks and wouldn't provide them (at least prior to victory) for free would be my first target--if you shoot a few rounds in the manufacturing plant, at the very least the assembly line workers would get moving (if they're robots, you may have to move to the IT Department).

ROSE-COLORED GLASSES: "Some unfortunate people never take their rose-colored glasses off, but everyone wears these spectacles occasionally. This attitude of cheerful optimism, of seeing everything in an attractive, pleasant light, has always been with us, while the expression itself goes back to at least 1861, when it is first recorded in 'Tom Brown at Oxford': 'Oxford was a sort of Utopia to the Captain.He continued to behold towers, and quadrangles, and chapels, through rose-colored glasses." From the "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997)

for some reason i've heard rose-tinted lenses more often, but maybe i'm just a freak.

The pre hyper drive storyline tells of Drengin conquests and other severe interactions between races that are beyond the perview of stargates,,,,....,,,, 'pre hyper drive', yes i say again, pre hyper drive interactions???

That one beats me, how did the Drengin meet us? And why the bloody hell did we give them hyperdrive?

"Here Mr. Wants to Enslave and Boil Me in Water and Eat My Skin, take this free hyperdrive so that you may have everlasting prosperity! Besides, you have a trusting name, so here it is for free!"

The Torians (Double baggers by definition) are Super Breeders....

I mean, come on...can you imagine a Friday Night at a Torian Night Club????? EWWWWWWWWWW.....gack gack.

Incredible how far some people's fantasy will go
I bet (hope) no one at Stardock even remotely thought of that when they added the Super Breeder ability...

Fact- Torians have 2,000 different ways to say "lets just get down and dirty right here"