Evochron

Evochron is a series of Wide Open Sandbox singleplayer/multiplayer space simulators.

It includes:
 * Riftspace (2004)
 * Evochron (2005)
 * Evochron Alliance (2006)
 * Evochron Renegades (2007)
 * Evochron Legends (2009)
 * Evochron Mercenary (2010)

Players create a profile, which is shared between singleplayer games and multiplayer servers - if you were to buy a ship in singleplayer, it'd be taken with you in multiplayer. If you were then to upgrade the ship in multiplayer and save, you could use the upgraded ship in singleplayer. Ships are customizable by swapping frames (the cockpit and body of the ship), engines (acceleration), wings (strafing power, turning power), shield generators, fuel storage, and cargo bays.

It has gameplay similar to Freelancer, another space combat simulator. However, it also supports planetary exploration, Newtonian physics, and is much more wide and open.

It contains examples of the following tropes: ---
 * Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: As you move outwards from Sapphire (but especially "south"), everything becomes progressively more expensive, though more advanced technology is available the further out you go.
 * Air Jousting: Due to the lack of friction, and the low acceleration of most ships, fights often turn into ships boosting at each other, firing their guns and missiles, then spinning around and firing their boosters again.
 * Asteroid Thicket: Played straight and averted; Most asteroids are clumped together, with 10-20 asteroids in a 10x10x10 KM area. Some solar systems however, have asteroids very thinly spread out across the system.
 * Cool Spaceship: The military fighters, the Leviathan civilian ship.
 * Instant Death Radius: Go ahead, try to land on Earth in Mercenary.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: Some of the high end missiles do this; launching volleys of 8 Roboteching rockets that home in on the target, and change targets when their main target is destroyed.
 * Old School Dogfighting: Fighting with the Inertial Dampening System will cause your ship to handle like a fighter, at the cost of lower speed (automatically slows you down if you go past its max), increased fuel usage, and slower strafing. Dogfights on planets play this straight, as players need to maintain a constant forward speed otherwise their wings loose lift and then plummet.
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Planets are tiny; maybe 20km in diameter, and the distance between them is fairly small, in planetary terms. Though the planets are tiny, they take a while to explore.
 * Space Friction: Averted. There is no friction in the game, except on planets. Firing your boosters when in inertial flight will cause you to drift forever. Spacecraft have a speed limit, however. The Inertial Dampening system will use your maneuvering thrusters to make your ship act like there's friction, but it slows you down and wastes fuel.
 * Space Is Noisy: Rocket boosters, missiles, and lasers can all be heard inside your cockpit, along with explosions in space.
 * Story to Gameplay Ratio: Nearly zero plot! There's a back story (some aliens invade the colonies of Earth or something), but you get barely any of it in-game.