[Noble713]

Make sure that the colony ship has population on it before it leaves a planet. You can do this one of two ways.

1)If you give the ship the Colonize order while in orbit of an inhabited planet, it will automatically load people before it leaves. Try not to do this on sparsely populated planets as you can occasionaly take their entire population with you and then you'd have another ghost colony.

2)Select the colony ship, and press the Cargo Transfer button up top. Click on the people on the planet to transfer them to the ship.

Alternatively, you could send the colony ship without people, and use a transport to bring them later (again, using the Cargo Transfer button).