Starships & Spacemen (via RPGNow.com) that is. This was one of the earliest SF roleplaying games, and I remember enjoying the heck out of it with my brothers and sister. It was basically an unlicensed Star Trek game, with the PCs serving as crew on a “Confederation” starship. Classes represented various branches of the service, and there were various races that were analogs of the races of Star Trek: the logical emotionless Taurans, the telepathic Andromedans, the space-mercenary Rigelians, or the boring old Humans.
I was tempted to pick up Space Opera while I was at it, but my recollection of that was that it was so complex that by the time we had finished rolling up characters we had pretty much exhausted our interest in the game. I think we made it through a couple of sessions before giving up and going back to Traveller.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 
About two months ago I pulled out my Starships & Spacemen set from the FGU shelf and read the whole thing again.
To be honest, I wasn’t as impressed with it this time around. At least it’s not as insanely detailed and all over the place as Other Suns (also by FGU).
I even made a character for Starships & Spacemen… http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/starships-spacemen-mr-terror-gessek/
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There is something about old sci-fi games you just can’t find in newer games.
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Space Opera wasn’t that bad. About the same as D&D as I remember- except it had ships.
@gleichman well, it was thirty years ago, so I might be misremembering. Didn’t it have a life-path system for chargen?
Dang, now I’m tempted to go pick it up…
Life Path? I don’t think so, I remember it having classes (Armsman was one).
Decades ago, can barely remember…
@gleichman – well, it was only $7 so I couldn’t resist. Turns out that while it is class-based, it has a Traveller-like enlistment system…you enlist in a service (most services accept all the classes in different roles) and then serve a number of terms, rolling each term to see if you get promoted, get an assignment particular to the service (command of a ship, discover a new planet) and if you can re-up, with mods based on your stats. Your total time in service and final rank determines mustering out benefits and how many extra points you can spend on skills, and the service determines what skills in what proportion you can spend on. So quite a bit more complicated than either D&D or Traveller, though perhaps not the most complicated I’ve seen.
Doesn’t seem like too much extra effort to me.
More freedom than D&D (much like 3.5 D&D in a way), and more control (and more genre like characters) than Traveller.
I like the trade.
There are a rather excessive number of modifiers to the rolls, which vary by service, branch and rank attained, and there can be from 2 to 15 terms of service even without counting re-enlistment. It’s not terribly well organized, either. (E.g. the modifiers to one branch may say the same as some other branch in some other service, with the addition of X as a modifier.) I suspect it could be done fairly easily with a spreadsheet since there don’t appear to be any choices to make before you’re mustered out and have to allocate your skill points, but it seems potentially pretty tedious.