It's in the same genre as EV, Star Control II, etc. It has been out for over a decade now and still under active development with a stable player base. The economic side is generally more about making bases and colonies and setting up automated trade routes than hauling stuff around manually, though. In general, people set up their economy while going off to do missions and explore in parallel.
I've devised a way to have a procedurally generated tech tree. Actually, it's an inexhaustably large number of tech trees in a huge Directed Acyclic Graph. The particular resources will be partially location dependent, which will motivate the exploration and trading. That's the plan, anyways.
Wish I could, but like I said in my first post I just haven't been able to find any similar space/trader games on the same level as EVN. Maybe someone else will be able to chime in.
But my guess is just that it's not really a popular enough genre, which is why there's such a dearth in games of similar style and quality.
I dont even mind browser games, since mechanics>graphics for me.