I agree about Escape Velocity focusing too much on combat for true Elite fans like myself. Pretty much everything you described as your dream game is mentioned in the wiki page. The intention is to make it lean heavily towards dynamic economy and X3-style 'space mogulism', as I like to put it.
The game is open-source and platform independent (tested on Linux), so if you want to compile it yourself, the sources for this release are available in the google code downloads section. It requires three Brucey's modules in the compilation, which are mentioned in the building_prerequisites.txt file.
The game is open-source and platform independent (tested on Linux), so if you want to compile it yourself, the sources for this release are available in the google code downloads section. It requires three Brucey's modules in the compilation, which are mentioned in the building_prerequisites.txt file.