The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Just take a look at this program called SpaceEngine.
en.spaceengine.org (http://en.spaceengine.org)

It's an open, 3D, procedurally-generated, free space exploration engine, based on actual astro catalog data. Used adaptive level of detail, so you can warp through stars or hover the detailed surface of any celestial body. With physically realistic procedural worlds, stars, nebulae, etc etc...

Now imagine a Star Control game with this engine... Just... WOW :o :o :o

Looks interesting.
If he ever gets as far as programming modules for games with that engine, I'm sure some fans can be found to recreate the SC2 story in the world run by that engine.

But I can't imagine putting this engine in UQM.

Also: What about HyperSpace and QuasiSpace?
And will my ship die because the autopilot flew over the sun?

Not interesting to me; SpaceEngine is proprietary.

Even if whether a program is libre doesn't matter to you, what about high scientific accuracy says "Star Control" to you? Nothing about any of the Star Control games are even remotely scientifically accurate. The heat of stars is completely wrong, the starmap is completely made-up and not even influenced by real-life stars, combat takes place on a 2-D plane wrapped around a torus, ships' orientation is limited to 16 angles, gravity is hugely simplified, ships are as big as planets, asteroids are overly-abundant, ships are armored by meat shields, kinetic weapons have a limited range, you can hear things in space, small ships are unrealistically agile, planets are all incredibly small, planets are cylindrical, and battery regeneration is linear.

Star Control's game mechanics are designed to be good enough for the game, not scientifically accurate.

Though not entirely fabricated. By name at least we have quite a few "actual" star systems in game.

I'm pretty sure all of them are names of real stars, but it's explicitly stated that they don't actually correspond to these stars in-universe. In-universe, the names were just applied to the stars on the Hyperspace map because there is no correlation between Hyperspace and real space anyway, and it was deemed to be better than naming the stars after historical leaders.

If open-sourceness is to be considered, then may I cite Freespace 2?
http://www.gog.com/news/freespace_2_open_source_code_project_spotlight

The engine appear to be somewhat improved and, although looks like not to be much easy to install, there are already project modules to use crafts from various sci-fi shows.

FreeSpace 2 isn't libre or open source; it's under a non-commercial license.

If you're looking at 3-D space game engines (though I can't imagine why, to be honest), the only ones I'm aware of that are libre are those of Vega Strike (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/) and Pioneer (http://pioneerspacesim.net/). I haven't played either of them, personally (I think I tried to play one of them before but couldn't figure out how to compile, or something).

A Great War campaign in SCP would be great, I'd love to design missions for it, but I don't think 3D is the future for any Star Control adventure game.

I could easily envision a Freespace 2 SCP mod campaign set in the Star Control universe, though.