It may not be the best known example, but lately in my quest to create a campaign setting during one of the "false dawns" of the Long Night, I've found a lot of inspiration from a related pair of 1970s Saturday morning live-action kids' TV shows, Space Academy and Jason of Star Command. While a lot of the in-universe ideas don't translate well to Traveller, some of the basic ideas of the series have a lot of appeal, even if they require some serious messing with the game background. I have found a lot of inspiration on this forum, including discussions about the duration and nature of the Long Night, as well as references to using kids as characters in Traveller, which pointed me towards a couple of old Space Gamer articles about how to have precocious teenagers in one's game.
The two series were really separate, with different casts (except for a robot, Peepo), but the same setting, a large asteroid base called, alternately, Space Academy and Star Command (the introduction suggested that Star Command was a secret organization within Space Academy, but it makes more sense to me to have Star Command being the name of the military service that Space Academy graduates serve in after graduation.) Space Academy has more of an episodic feel, with episodes that are mostly self-contained. The main characters, led by Jonathan Pryce Lost in Space as Commander Gampu, are all young people, ranging from "tweens" to late teens (although a couple of the actors were in their early twenties.) Because it's a kiddie show, there is a lot more emphasis on avoiding disaster and solving space mysteries through cooperation instead of violence. Often, the "villain" of the show ends up becoming friends with the characters by episode's end, resolving their differences in a "pro-social" manner, which as a central theme of a lot of Filmation kids' shows of the 1970s. I like this aspect too, as a potential alternative to the typical Traveller group's tendency to shoot their way out of any problem. A couple of the characters are psionic, which has potential game applications.
Jason of Star Command was released after Star Wars basically blew up the conventions of SF in the mid-seventies. They used the same asteroid base, and I think the interior sets of the Space Academy "Seeker" class ship were re-used as the Star Command "Starfire" class, more of a high-performance gunship/corvette, while the Seeker was more of a Scout Service style exploration vessel (albeit armed with pulse lasers.) The titular Jason was a pilot/scoundrel cut from the Han Solo mode, with a noble heart, although he had a tendency to buck authority--technically he wasn't a member of Star Command but seemed to be the central focus of their most important missions. Other cast included James Doohan as the series' first base commander, until he left the series to to ST:TOS, Susan O'Hanlon as Jason's foil Captain Nicole Davidoff, and the stereotypical gawky scientist type, Professor E.J. Parsifoot. The second season changed up the "good guy" cast, replacing Doohan with the blue-skinned, grumpy Commander Stone, and Tamara Dobson, best known as "Cleopatra Jones" of blaxploitation film fame, as Samantha, a tall, mysterious psychic with a turban (inspiration for the Zhodani?) that Jason rescues from a low berth on a doomed ship. Both seasons include the aforementioned annoying robot Peepo, and a tiny, far too useful wind-up toy/plot device called W1K1. The main series villain is Dragos, played with a very "Ming the Merciless" vibe by the magnificent Sid Haig, with his own asteroid craft, the Dragonship, and a flotilla of robot fighters (having robot fighters means the series could blow them up without killing anyone--it's still a kiddie show.) Instead of Space Academy's episodic Star Trek structure, Jason of Star Command was structured as a serial, with cliffhangers ending the episode in the first season. One idea I wouldn't be copying from the shows is their shortcut for space suits, a "life support unit" that clipped on a belt and allowed safe traversal of vacuum (sorry kids, you've gotta put on a spacesuit to leave the ship or Bad Things happen!)
While a lot of the setting may seem a little silly and lightweight for the typically grim and violent Traveller universe, I think it inspired my early Traveller experiences, having watched the shows religiously as a kid, and getting into Traveller about five years later circa 1982, carried a lot of the Star Command metaphors into my early Traveller universe. In the Traveller universe I'm working on, the setting is a subsector-sized cluster of worlds on the fringe of the old Imperium, colonized by refugees fleeing the collapse of the Rule of Man and regressed from TL 11 Second Imperium tech levels to pre-jump TL 8-9. Because this subsector was located in between a small polity in the adjacent subsector on one side, and a hostile species of Humaniti with their own, expansionist empire on the other, the colonists built three large "Star Command" bases at the edge of their space, serving as a bulwark against hostile expansion. These TL-11 relics are 200 kton buffered planetoids with turret and bay weaponry, and generally not jump capable (I'm still toying with whether to include jump drives); the universe is mostly "small-ship" except for the Star Command bases, which each have a Space Academy section to train new crew. The war against the hostile empire was catastrophic for these young colony worlds, decimating their population and resources, while also breaking the back of the invaders, resulting on both space polities sinking to pre-Jump tech levels.
As to the function of Space Academy and Star Command: The worlds of this subsector are mostly aligned along a subsector sized Jump-1 main, and about 50 years ago, the worlds with Star Command bases were able to get the old systems working after a century of disuse, and started producing Jump-1 drives again--the venerable "Seeker" ships, basically a variant on the old Imperial scout ships, intended for exploration and communication. The past few decades involved re-consolidation of bits of the old federation, and because most of the worlds involved were happy to regain interstellar capability and trade, most of this period was one of productive rediscovery. In order to train a new generation of space crews, the Space Academies opened their airlocks to bright young people throughout the subsector, teaching not only technical skills but morality and cooperation, under the guidance of an old and somewhat mysterious Vilani admiral, Isaac Gampu, who was reputedly old enough to remember the old Second Imperium and the ages of war (the Gampu of the show was reputed to be almost 300 years old; theoretically a long-lived Vilani with a supply of naturally obtained anagathics might substitute.) This might be the best place to introduce the PCs as teenagers, with a few Level-0 skills and perhaps one or two actual skill levels, representing the gifted and talented young people of Space Academy--I'm still debating about the psionics part. This part of the campaign will involve exploration, cooperation, puzzle solving and interpersonal conflict--and (comparatively) rapid gains in skill levels for the PCs who are students (some might be instructors or other Space Academy personnel assigned to teach their young charges the ways of space.)
The Jason of Star Command part introduces some new elements--Prof. EJ Parsifoot rediscovers the Jump-2 drive, installed in the "Starfire" class gunboat, the fastest ship this side of Beta 2. The Starfire is larger (200 tons compared to the Seeker's 100 tons), faster, and includes a "Star Pod," a 10-ton unstreamlined ship's boat/escape pod. Jason's status as a civilian outside of Star Command implies positions for PCs outside the military command structure, perhaps as auxiliaries, or just that Star Command recruiting isn't doing so hot these days. This Jump-2 ship allows more communication outside the subsector main, helping to consolidate Star Command into a larger polity--but on the other side of the Jump-2 rift, a new emperor named Dragos is working on a Jump-2 drive of his own, and a new superweapon of his own that he can use to reclaim his empire's glory days and destroy Star Command, who shamed his people in a battle that took place in his great-grandfather's days, once and for all!
So obviously my campaign setting diverges a lot from the show, but uses it for inspiration and a slightly different sort of Traveller campaign universe; no Third Imperium, no tech higher than TL-11, and most travel limited to about half a sector (incidentally, my plan is to use one of the old Judges Guild non-canon sectors as the game setting.) Gauss and plasma weaponry are not yet miniaturized enough for personal use, and most ships are "small-ship" aside from large, exceptionally rare base ships. The game's metaphors take some items from "collapse" settings, old space opera, and my generation's Saturday morning live-action TV. I'm using MgT2 to design the Seeker, Starfire, Star Pod and other Star Command ships, as well as the base itself, along with Dragos' "Dragonship" asteroid vessel and semi-autonomous robot fighters. I may even use another artifact of the Filmation shows, the Ark II, to represent the classic Traveller wheeled ATV in the campaign. We'll see whether I can tolerate a "Peepo" style smart-aleck robot, or stick to a more TL-11 style robot with limited communication ability.
