Here here, one-off games can be mighty entertaining.  Plus I don't like dying.

You are correct.

I glanced over that wikipedia article that you posted on traveler, it sounds like a really cool game and I'd love to play a sci-fi based game, even on a regular basis. The wikipedia article did mention that there are numerous publishers and versions of Traveler.  What version should we be prepared to play and are there any books that you can suggest we purchase or at least read through to prepare for the game?  Should we create characters for it?

Well creating characters is a "game within a game" as it were. I would play episodic style i think with each session an independent story. For ship combat I'm leaning towards starmada. For any land vehicle combat i think carwars. Everything else the original traveller does well enough i think. 

I dont have my original stuff anymore so I ordered this one
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but any of the classic Traveller stuff works. My inspiration was the LBB (little black books) 0-8.

Trying to work out how to do ship combat though. One player is driving and another gunning and then third? the fourth? got to come up with a system that allows each character to meaningfully perform actions beyond just rolling a  couple of dice. Maybe dynamic shielding or some such....

Yeah but its tough to keep that intresting as an rp oppurtunity while maintaing the flow of the "starship" combat... Will have to work it out.

Maybe depending on the scenarios have multiple encounters going at once??!! Hmmm...

The problem isnt really having tasks assigned to each character, rather its making those tasks meaningful and significant from both an Roleplay perspective and from a mechanics perspective.  Sure you can be a gunner but if there is no meaningful choice in the scope of your actions, then its not really all that exciting. 

Having damage control teams would be useful in RL but making those engadging roleplay encounters on par with piloting the ship on a game board takes some doing. It essentially be like running seperate encounters for each character. It could happen...

One benefit of savage worlds is that tom could use a whole lot more of his d12's!

Par of the appeal of Traveller for me is partly nostalgic another is that its d6. The game itself is fairly simple. On par with basic D&D. It also allows for easy expansions and home-rules etc. 

Well that and making star charts is at least as fun as making dungeons!