I managed to get a few more records last night to push my total count to about a 1000, but seemed like the Tier7 threshold was still quite a bit away. I was looking at the tiers last night and realising that the spread is pretty weird - the first six tiers are linear and then there are two, massive, equally spaced jumps to T7 and T8. Seems odd they didn't do more of a curve. It was a fun goal though. I'm more looking forward to seeing if any of my planets will be host to one of the 8 outposts, and moreso to seeing how far out these stations will be. Might be a nice base for further exploration...