Nova

Nova is a space exploration game played over the PLATO network. Players can cruise around the galaxy and visit different solar systems. The player beholds the galaxy from a space ship in a first person perspective.

It is played in real time, with real physics. Ships are entire ringworlds, with Bussard ramjets replacing the central sun. The galaxy is populated by stars using a pseudo-random number generator, which operates on a real galactic density function from the astrophysical literature. So stars doesn't move and can be revisited.

"stargen", the lesson space (program) that creates the stars, uses the same galactic density function to create a population of stars representing the types most likely to be found at that position. It uses a fourth-order Runge-Kutte integration in energy shells. The planet generator uses the elements found in the generated star to come up with a likely planetary system. Planets farther away from the sun will have atmospheric gasses which does not add up to 100% because some of the gasses will have frozen out on the planetary surface.

The game was never fully completed because a) you needed a battle computer to actually have a battle, and b) five running instances of the battle computer were too much for CDC 7600 mainframe it was played on.