You can now buy and sell ships, no longer are you stuck with the Cobra MkIII, there's more ships and weapons and ship systems/customisations than ever.

You could now land on planetary bases! Even land rough on planetary surfaces! That's something that even 'Elite Dangerous' (which was a ripoff to start with - David Braben turned scumbag without Ian Bell!) still does not do here in 2021 after seven years of continual improvement and DLCs! I couldn't believe the difference between this and previous Amiga Elite only five years earlier.

The whole Milky Way on two disks? Jesus! And unlike the previous Elites it's using real star names (well ok, 99% of the galaxy beyond the 50-100ly neighbourhood around Sol was procedurely generated nonsense starnames like 'Bucdontif' all over again), and fully populated realistic star systems with many planets and moons, and even sub moons, and asteroid belts, and multiple star systems, and proper spectral classes! No more nothing but single G-class stars with just one inhabited planet and one station as the only docking place. This was another of those 'hello, this is next stage in game evolution' moments when I first saw it in 1994.

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