How can I perform detailed calculations to determine the flavor of my crew members' sweat like this?
Actually, crew are something I'm toying with. Ultimately I don't think I'll go down that path but it might be something I add in later.
Any idea when we can expect to see a beta version of the full game?
Right now, I'm at the point where everything depends on having a number of complex systems behind it. Like before I put trade in, I need to work on the supply / demand system, which relies on crunching some numbers until they come out all right. Same as here, to make space relied on me building the generator which meant doing a whole lot of work plus trial and error around how I wanted space to look.
Will there be natives on some Planets which provide some sort of resistance against the ruthless exploitation of their world? Maybe be by randomly destroying mining equipment or such?
I will likely add AI controlled NPCs but the core concept is that space is mostly empty and the players are the only civilization - free to colonise where they choose. Which also means that in order to populate a planet, colonists have to be brought in from an already existing planet with population growth. The idea is then that players will form alliances and "protect" their people / civilization as well as attack (and potentially wipe-out) others.
a description on the left side would be useful when i'm on the planet, like, instead of just "Object: Ps13g:WFFP.L", something that says: "this is a gas giant", "this is a mesoplanet", "this is an ocean planet" or a protoplanet etc, some kind of description anyway
and you could implement stuff to add to your ship that informs you with a longer description, like what kind of resources there might be or stuff
All planned. Technically, if you look at the letters and numbers of a name closely enough you will see some of that already gives clues - but yes, there'll be ways to "Analyse" a planet and discover what resources are there, as well as having a basic run-down. At the moment I'm fiddling with combining the Scanners all into one system.
another would be the occasional treat of a background tile showing a distant system or galaxy
I could randomly add these in by seeding the random number generator with the x,y co-ordinates so that they end up "fixed". I'd just need the images.
Another suggestion which falls in the extreme aspie territory (and might take more effort for a largely unneeded and trivial payoff) is the transitions from one type of background tile set to another. Would there be a way to have a transitional tile along the borders between two types of space? Of course it would also need to detect what type of tile to use depending on the direction.
Technically, it would be fairly simple to work out - the only issue is having the graphics. And you'll note some Systems overlap other Systems, potentially creating transitions between every type of background into every other...
Graphic-wise you only need 3 extra images for each background (inner corner, outer corner and side) which are then rotated (which is possible in CSS3, although may be a bit difficult to initially get right). And for systems that run into other systems, it might be possible to do some sort of CSS (or even HTML5) trickery where I overlap two transition images on top of each other.
Again, I'd just need the graphics.
t when I went in to take a screen shot to crudely edit, it looks like there are star backgrounds everywhere... or is this just me being my normal dazed self?
Not that I don't like it.
Yeah, default background has stars.
at least you tried. 
