Okay, let me ask more pointed questions.
Has anyone played A Call To Arms before? It's not Traveller-centric, but it seems popular enough.
How about TOG, or whatever it's official name is? Leviathan, Renegade Legion, etc.
Next question. Does Wahammer 40k have space combat rules? They have 5,000,000,000 miniatures. Surely they have rules. Anyone play them? Call me a tyro, a newbie, or just ignorant. Guilty.
Better question. What are the most popular spaceship combat wargaming rules, if there are any?
The ones I know of are defunct, I guess, aside from Power Projection. Maybe there's no demand? But surely with all those miniatures out there...
I've played Renegade Legion
Interceptor and
Leviathan. Didn't much care for Leviathan - too fiddly for fleet combat, to abstracted for ship-on-ship. Some cool bits, tho - the boxes in place of minis was genius. And Interceptor is way too detailed for many - it's not quite to Brilliant Lances, but it is as close as remains playable.
40K has a space combat game... Battlefleet Gothic. It's about as unrealistic as one can get. Fixed speed; no engine left, stop dead, manual operation of the guns, etc.
The
Rogue Trader RPG incudes a close variant of BFG, as well.
Power Projection is a (IMO Poor) adaptation of
Full Thrust. It took most of the simplicity away. Full Thrust is awesome - fast, simple, moderately realistic. Suffers from 2 design systems and 2 movement systems (3 counting the Earthforce Sourcebook by Chameleon Ecclectic).
Battletech has 2 different space combat games:
Battlespace and
Aerotech. Different damage taking mechanics. Battlespace suffers from the integration of the damage mechanic from RL:Leviathan.
There is also
Star Fleet Battles and it's faster playing child,
Federation Commander. SFB is overtaken with complexity, so much so that SVC (the designer) recently stated that the games he writes are not the games he prefers to play. It's no longer the dominant market force it used to be; Fed Commander is a faster playing, less math intensive game.
SFB's sexier sister is
Starfire. And once it left the care of David Webber (Yes, the noted Author) and Todd W Crump, it added nitpicky and overdetailed rules, too. First two editions are excellent light tactical/supertactical games, with playable strategic engines. I love the tactical game. Most of the remaining fanbase play the strategic game. Don't play with less than 3 ships to a side, tho'. Non-newtonian, 10%C fleet speeds...
For the really self-flagellating gamer, there is the excellent but space-demanding
Star Fleet Battle Manual and
Alien Space Battle Manual. Fun, fast, light... but you need at least 3m x 3m to play. 5mx5m is better. And you're measuring movement in mm... up to about 500mm per turn, In my limited experience.
There are several others that I haven't played: Silent Death, Starmada, something by Mongoose, Star Blazers Fleet Battles
Note that several (SFB, Starfire, SBFB all 4 FASA ones) are hex-grid games with minis available.
The most popular seems to be Starmada. SFB is way down the list - so much so that ADB has cut deals with them to have an SFU flavor (Klingon Armada). The Deal with Mongoose was implied by SVC to be primarily about Prime Directive, but it's resulted in an SFU Flavor of Mongoose's minis game.