Ok, so seriously I am looking for problems with this idea. The first thing that comes to mind is if you multiply the polpulation by 1000, you've just made planets 1000 times harder to destroy.
I am all for making planets tougher, but I haven't heard anyone suggesting they need to be 1000 times tougher. TO counter this some you can reduce the damage to kill one pop in the settings.txt file. It's at 10 by default. So you reduce this to 1 and it's only 100 times harder than it is now to destroy a colony. Is this too tough? We can increase the power of planetary weapons to help with this, but will it be enough? And if it is does it take Weapon platforms completely out of the equation. There are some details to work out in this before anyone tries implementing this change.
Next would be reproduction. If we change the scale of the population numbers, but not counter that somehow with the reproduciton then people skip right over rabbits and start breeding like bacteria. That's no good. We can change the reproduction check frequency. Not sure how high you can make it. I'll have to test that some. Is taht all you would need to do to correct this? Maybe I am missing something else important. along these lines.
Geoschmo