Not to be confused with the ios and android title Star traders, this is a much older game, indeed it can still be played directly with Telnet, although there is a fully working working web browser version.

Darren Harris mentioned this one on audeasy as a game he played a while ago, and it's now been tracked down so I thought everyone might wish to know about it.
At times I believe it's been referd to as tsar wars and currently it goes under the title "last resort" however the url is still http://www.starshiptraders.com.

The game is much like trade wars in that you have a ship, fly between ports in numbered sectors which make up galaxies, trading commodities, harvesting resources from planets, fighting with other players and buying things like fighters and rockets to defend your ship, starbases to either attack a sector or defend it, and bunkers to store resources.

One mildly annoying fact about the game is that you have to actually create an account to see the manual, so it's a little difficult to get an idea before you play. From what I gather though there are some quite unique things, not only many different types of items to buy and sell from military gear to ship upgrades, but also interestingly enough just hree sorts of resources  to trade in, though i believe there are some trading limits in the game meaning that staying on the move, or carefully defending an area is a good idea.

I also admire the way the game's interface works, sinse there is a standard telnet style textbox at the bottom where you can enter commands, however there are also textual links to information further up the page that you can just click, really it's one of the best implementations of a bbs style game I've seen on the net, (particularly sinse I gather the game is huge with literally millions of sectors and rooms in space, so having access to fly by links rather than typing in complex number codes is helpful). You don't even need an e-mail address, you can just type in a name and password.

I've only just started looking through the manual and getting an idea of the game, so people are welcome to come and have a look, but sinse I know there are fans of the scifi trading and battling type of games out there, I thought people might want to know asap.