Starships.

So this will be a game with a multitude of inhabited planets orbiting quite some stars, and somewhat detailed crews to push around… right, there ought to be spacecraft.

 Of course in such a title said spacecraft should be as modular as possible, not only because this allows for a very detailed damage system and more interesting flight-physics, but also because the players can build their own starships from modules. (also the NPCs build their ships from modules, what should be good for quite some variance), but wait, there is more.

I personally deem not space sim complete, when there is not a cockpit view. If you can expect it from semi-historical flight sims, you should be able to expect it from your regular space dogfighting game, even if it makes not that much sense.
From this point on, it's pretty trivial (from a technical standpoint) to allow free movement inside the ship, pretty much like we know it from Silent Hunter 5. But this time in space, and with Role-playing mechanics in it. Interacting with your crew should be one of the most important parts of the game.

Procedural Cluster generation

Since we now have the ability to roll up an arbitrary number of unique planets, we will need stars for these to Orbit.

The basic Idea is that the titular 'Incident' (that's the main plot) only has two to four fixed planets it involves. Although those planets will be randomly generated as well, they will have certain 'hardpoints' from the plot. The course of said metaplot will evolve semi-procedurally, depending on the cluster that was created. Distances and ressource availability may affect the movement of large fleets, this should also influence maximum playtime in a much more elegant and unpredictable way than say a timer.

As said - the cluster will be generated when the player begins a campaign, and will be able to share both - the save file and the seed that generated this particular playing experience.
 

 the Images seen here are all fully generated 3D galaxies with 0 to 3 inhabitet planets per star. This boils down to about 450 - 650 inhabited planets for the whole cluster. (yes, since this is - to a certain part - supposed to be a trading simulation, I want the cluster to be full of inhabited worlds)

Procedural Planet Generation works.

The Planet Generator currently is just a terminal program, but never the less, it's the first Milestone in making "The Taurus Incident" (title could be subject to change).
Currently it is working with lots and lots of text output for me to check for any bugs. Of course the whole thing will run in the Background (to be exact once at startup), when the Cluster is first generated.

Working on Linux has it's merits when working with interpreted Languages such as Python, since it is relatively simple to have a terminal window 'watching' the code (eg. running it in a certain interval) this makes for a dirt-cheap way to get direct feedback on written code and also makes saving a lot a standard practice.

The 'Planet Generator' is currently saving the Planets in a XML-like form to be both - easily query and editable. Currently the 'Cluster' will be generated on start of the game, and players will be able to share their unique Clusters.
This should also provide a conveniant way of modding the game once it's out there - you will just have to edit some xml-files. Installing mods will be as easy as copying a savegame.