Good non KSP Space Sim?

[Fel]

Much laser in X3, even mucher bad guys. You can even steal their ships. Or be the bad guy and steal other guys goods. Or fly big ship and throw little ships at stuff.

Nah seriously, look up a Gameplay-Video or two, X3 has much to offer for various gamestyles. Trading: check, pirates: check, mining: check, station building: check, boom&zoom dogfights: check, capital ships and carriers: check, and the list goes on.

Some people experienced a weird learning curve with X3 though.

The annoying part of X-Series is that there isn't really a learning curve.

There are pirates... but they mostly just sit around and spawn so you can pump up your combat level or suicidally fly into guarded sectors so you can pump up relations. Even in their own sectors they aren't guarding the gates making flying through rather.... meh.

Trading gets really lame really fast once you realize that you're the only real trader, and rapidly doubling investments until you setup a spp and just forget about trading is as far as it really goes.

What the game really has is the absolutely enormous space battles... that people just keep making bigger and bigger via mods. The pew pew factor is immense, just that the rest of the game feels like a disappointment.