I've played an earlier version of this, I think it was Evochron Alliance or one of those. It was cool to play at first, but after about 10 hours you've seen everything the game has to offer because everything is generated from formulas. It's heavily repetitive and most of the missions were just "fly somewhere, get badly written clue, waste hours thinking about the answer, give up and read the faq, fly to the next area for the next clue."
Designing your own ship was fun until you realized all ships were based off the same equations and the size/appearance absolutely didn't matter.
Spaceship encounters were random...but they were constant. It didn't matter where you went...there someone was...always.
Every release since then has been a few small improvements sold as a brand new game. Good for a one man effort, but not really worth the money IMO.