Is there a point to station building?

[hourheroyes]

To my understanding, sectors only stay loaded 5min after a player has been in them.  Stations require other stations to get their resources, so for a player to build a self-sufficient complex, they would have to do it all in the same sector and then "idle" as their stations produced resources and fed each other.  You couldn't go explore the universe AND get passive income at the same time, thereby making stations pretty pointless.

 

This seems like a pretty big gap in how stations/infrastructure COULD work (compared to X3, for instance), so I imagine there has to be an alternate plan for the game as it's developed... or am I missing some key gameplay element?

[Subquake]

Laserzwei made a mod, that emulates the production cycles of Factories while you are not in the same sector:

 

http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1322.0.html