I've never played Stars, but there's a free demo for SE IV available for download
here .
It allows you to play the first 100 turns, and should give you a pretty good idea what to expect. The demo hasn't been patched up to the current full Version, though, so there may be a few discrepancies.
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Cap'n Q
My first SE IV mod!
Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"