Knight Hawks came out after the original Star Frontiers set came out, and we had already adopted starships from Traveller and Space Opera into our games. I wish this had come out at the same time, since we adopted the Star Wars-style "Millennium Falcon" trope into our games, turning starships into "space RVs" with anti-gravity, able to land on planets, and serving as flying hotels with antimatter engines.
Nothing kills science fiction faster than a magic space RV.
The ship lands next to space dungeons; there is no need for overland travel, landing at starports is a why bother, there is no need to carry shuttlecraft or orbital space planes, and the ship becomes "backup fire support" flying artillery for any ground mission. I have played decades of this, and having a destroyer hovering above the battlefield, turrets at the ready, really kills any challenge for the away team.
I wish our Star Frontiers campaign were a strict TL10^ game. Starships are these paper-thin, decks stacked like a loaf of bread, 1G acceleration, slow, weeks to get to a planet, dropship-carrying, atomic engines on sponsons, no artificial gravity, depressurize during space battles, flying cans with guns.
There are no magic "sensor beams," just radar and LADAR, and old-style radio direction finders. Telescopes and imaging equipment that detect brightness and radiated heat are used to detect objects at greater distances.
You should only have gravity when accelerating at 1G, a mid-point flip, and then deceleration at 1G provides gravity on the second half of the trip. There are no anti-gravity panels, and if you are in orbit, everyone is floating around. You need shuttles, dropships, starfighters with orbital capability, or space planes to get down to the planet. To get large cargo up, they fire it up on giant rockets that look like something from NASA or SpaceX. Starships are assembled in space and never land on a planet. Space stations handle interface duties and customs and provide 1G or gravity via giant rotating rings.
If you go on a mission, your ship needs to sit in orbit with a crew. You need a dropship and crew for that. If you land in a remote area, you need a flat space, and then you need to disembark an ATV or VTOL to get to where you want to go. If you will be there for a while, take camping supplies and survival equipment, including pressurized tents, solar panels, and life support units.
You need to take a ton of stuff with you for extended stays.
If your ship in orbit detects an unknown contact, and you know space pirates are in the area, they will go into action without you. You may be left stranded in your camp for a while, with your radio and heat-producing gear off, so nobody can detect you, staying silent to avoid detection. You may not know when your ship will return, if ever, since you both go radio silent. If you get on the radio, a pirate missile may come flying in from orbit at that signal.
And you won't be able to detect, see, or know what is up there in orbit, unless you get fortunate with your electro-binoculars and see it from the ground. You may have radio direction finders of your own that can help you detect objects in orbit.
The pirates may have dropped a satellite up there for some reason: to detect orbital ships, ground emissions, or radio traffic, or to relay communications. If you found that early, you could have blown it up or sent someone over to hack it and tap in, being wary of it being trapped with anti-tamper devices or explosives.
Big ships, like battleships, are a big deal and require a fleet. Most of the "grunt work" in the galaxy is done with smaller ships tooling about and solving problems. Fleets are expensive and for homeworlds, while colony worlds will have a handful of smaller ships for defense, if any. Space combat is closer to The Hunt for Red October than Star Wars.
Hard TL10^ is the way.
You get too high-tech, and it is the magic space RV landing on the planet. Even Traveller has this problem with its adventure ships. Go further, and you are teleporting to the surface. Very little from the GURPS skill list is needed, and there is no preparation or procedure. My TL10^ away-team has a small group of experts, including a doctor, a communications person, an engineer, security personnel, scientists, contact people, command, and others.
Past TL11, it is "the PCs get out of the ship," and one of them could be a bartender and another an entertainer. While that is great for light-hearted science fiction, more like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is not what Star Frontiers tried to do, or what I wish we had done.
For Star Frontiers, that genuine feeling is the TL10^ game, with lasers as the ultimate weapon and the entire universe closer to that 1980s ideal and vision of the future. This isn't smooth, ultra-sexy, future-tech, but that gritty, NASA-style, Interstellar, The Martian, Cold War naval battles, survival-in-space sort of game that GURPS does so well.
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