Firefly, okay, I'll try my best to explain how all this works.
The numbers are internal to the game, as far as I can tell, they don't have anything to do with distance. Sometimes close numbers can be close together but that's generally a coincidence and shouldn't be depended upon for anything.
Research points are one of the things your production goes into. Your planet produces something which they call billions of credits, or BC. That depends on the number of factories you have, and your technology, population produces a certain number of them, I think factories always produce just 1 per factory, but the number your population produces goes up as you research.
The BC get spent by the production sliders. I'm not sure if there's a BC to RP conversion anywhere, but basically the higher your research slider the more income your planet will produce. If you type the "emp," command, you will get an overview of how much you make in total, where it's going, and where it comes from. A lot of the time you don't need to really worry about specific planets once you set the sliders one way, you can generally leave them there a few turns without issues. One of the things people love about MOO is the lack of micromanagement.
Missile bases are paid for with the "d/defense," slider. They are automatically upgraded as you get new weapons technology, as long as you spend BC on defense. If you don't have enough to upgrade them all, it will show "upgrade," next to the defense slider, which just means you need to increase the slider a bit more to do so. Once all your bases are upgraded, further defense spending just builds new bases or planetary shields, if you have the tech for that.
Factories are built with the i/industrial slider. These are controlled by your population, each can control up to 2 factories at the start of the game, and as with many things in the game this increases with technology. Robotic controls allow you to have more factories controlled by fewer people. If you've reached the maximum number of factories you can support, "MAX," is displayed next to that slider. Factories start at out, I think, 10 Bc per factory and decrease gradually in cost as tech increases.
Finally, ecology is used for keeping your planets waste-free as well as terraforming them, which increases the population maximum among other things. It's generally best to keep your planets as waste-free as you can, though this can be hard if you need to spend 30% or more of your production on just that alone. Again, there's technology to gradually make it easier to do this.
Hope this helps.