Star Control 2 was absolutely a rip-off of starflight, though it did a lot of things better since, well, it was much newer.
However, in starflight, you could spend a single day on a planet, where as in SC2, you land, spend 5 minutes and pick up 10 mineral nodes, and leave. Some of the good planets in Starflight, such as ones with >60% mineral density, would have over 10,000 mineral nodes on the whole planet.
What always kept me in awe about the game, even today, is that they crammed a massive world (basically 800 planets full of minerals, lifeforms, and storylines), alien encounters, home-planet, interstellar travel, nebulas, plot, character development, and a lot of items on 2 360k floppies.
Edit: Important source code for starflight was released awhile ago by one of the original programmers. Its in forth though, so its fucking weird to read it. (Its not the whole thing though, but its a lot to know whats going on if you knew forth.
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare...79/SFFiles.zip