One possibility to get some game would be to integrate Christian Pinders Elite - The New Kind into glElite. Matrix code should be transposed to work OpenGL way. It works, but it is very very ugly. This is general and works, but I am not sure if it really is a good way to do it or not. The whole modelinstance placement requires rethink.
Current implementation runs out of precision when working with astronomical vertices.
Orthonormalization should also be added to matrices. There is code for displaylists, which has been used before reworking materials. Rendering architecture should be improved so that it knows how to get best performance when handling materials. I would like to have alpha blending effects like explosions and engine glows added to the rendering architecture. Some of these need that vertices are manually projected to screen coordinates.