[always]

But... until they actually release a new Star Control, this always needs to be bumped.

Also keep in mind what the Kzer-Za did for the Syreen.

Or is there a legal third party GUI extractor?

It's called "7zip".

[Canon]

Not cannon

Canon, damn it, canon!

It's not really that surprising, procedural generation was quite common, way back, because they didn't have the space to store all that data. Elite, for example, was perfectly capable of procedurally generating any number of galaxies (the game was originally going to have 2^48... Acornsoft decided this was slightly ridiculous and would make the artificiality of the game blindingly obvious, so it was limited to 8).