I had to visualize the galaxy generation, so I figured as long as I'm making images I may as well show them off. Here's what a galaxy with 10,000 stars looks like (the scale is in parsecs, by the way):

And with 100,000 stars:

I'm only 25% happy with the generation algorithm right now, but I need to stop messing with it and move on. I'm shocked I stumbled on something as good as this, honestly.

I'm holding off on deciding the scale of the game until I have more pinned down and can see how the performance scales; I can generate 100,000 star positions in a fraction of a second, but once each star has planets and stations and ships... we'll see. I mean, having a full-size 200 billion star replica of the Milky Way would be awesome, but overkill.