Then again, there's the other approach of taking a perfectly good band of Traveller [original rules] characters, mixing in some Paranoia-esk conspiracy and Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know...
It all started with the characters pulling a defunct exploration ship out of a mothball fleet as part of war scenario, with the expectation that they were part of a desperate attempt to assault an enemy space station in deep space. They were not prepared for the odd parts of the ship or sealed 'black box' modules attached to a very non-standard computer. The intel agent who searched the cabins really didn't know what to make of the strange crystal with the multi-hued glow [synthetic rainbow diamond] and the non-standard memory key attached to it...and when the shooting started and the ship requested 'Emergency Combat Override' permission... they put the card into the reader that popped out of the helm console. Foolish players...
Little did they know that the ship had been used as part of a deep covert operation by the forces of magik to study the Imperium... and that the crew was killed by my version of the BLS as they made their own pact with the Zhodani. That Zhodani base? A deep space location for a Multiversal gate...
Cutting to the close of that phase, the team made it through the gate on the blast wave of the complex blowing up. They're still not sure what was in pod bay 1, but it sure made a mess when the hellspirals formed on the space station....
That's when the real fun started, with a crippled ship trying to return home as the bound demons burned out and the spell matrices in the computer powered down. The crew managed to get it down in one piece, parked in a very deep river on top of a heavy metal deposit. It's still there, as the crew had a bit of an accident ashore later in the campaign. The Marine assault team found that FGMP-15's and power armor wasn't enough to trump an elder dragon mage. After all, he'd had several centuries to train his minions and build his defenses, thank you kindly.
As I recall we ran that scenario for about 18 months before the last of the team died, still trying to figure out how to get home ;]
One of the technical bits I used was the mega-damage system for Imperial materials like the ship hull. To be fair, I treated magik in deep space as doing MDC if free of a planetary gravity well [outside Van Allen Magnetic belts] as my view of magik is that it's a form of geo-magnetic force, for the most part. That makes Fusion guns really powerful, as they tend to disrupt most classes of spells due to the intense magnetic field of the power pack and at launch. Really surprised the mage who hooked up with the party when all his defensive spells went down, at a really bad moment ;]
I've frequently mixed a fair amount of SF material into my campaigns, the usual rule is if it's in my library it's fair game for use.
When I restart play next year my players have a few surprises to meet in the steam punk technology of my main world, as it competes with magik. Seems there's this rebellion in progress to the North......