You could've _asked_ what those space stations were. The Irha-Nrr tended to be very open, the only reason they ejected your cloaked scout ship was becaus you were being so suspiciously sneaky about it in the first place.
I built that nebula base because I'd misremembered which of the red nebula bitmaps was the "100% impenetrable" one and figured it'd never be seen, so why not? It was something I'd never done before in a "real" game, and I figured at some point in the far future if the Narcisston colonies immediately behind it got trashed I could use it as an emergency subsitute resupply point for my defences. Phoenix will vouch that I haven't even sent scout ships past that system since my first mapping foray in the first year or two of the game, he's been my partner the whole time and would have seen.
As for the victory conditions, I really didn't care who was first or second or whatever; I just wanted that year of peace to come about as soon as possible. The only time I ever care about the score when playing is when I'm worrying about triggering MEE, other than that it's a completely abstract and pointless number IMO. If you were so concerned about finishing that final year in "first place" I'd have been willing to gift you stuff until you got your wish. It's easy enough to pump your score to dizzying heights by just building big empty ship hulls.
I guess I was just RPing this one too much. That's why the subjugation treaty, too; I figured it'd buy the Irha-Nrr as much time as possible to continue stashing those "archive pods" all over space so that after they're destroyed there'll be a better chance they'll be able to restart again in the future. If you want to declare victory and end the game at this point, I'm willing.
Got a new race already playing a second game now that's explicitly intended to be RP-centric, so perhaps I'll do a little better. I'll be more careful about my defences this time, too.