What makes a good Sci-fi adventure

I have just been wondering, what makes a good sci-fi adventure. Unfortunately there are not a lot of adventures out there, and sci-fi makes up a small selection of them. These adventures also have different make up than your normal run of the mill DnD adventure. Caharacters seem like they are generally higher level, and it seems like it is hard to combine all the aspects of a good adventure in Sci-fi. If characters have a starship, then it seems like the ship often has to be tied into the adventure as well. What adventure mix do GMs look for in their adventures. What are some good examples of well balanced published sci-fi adventures (not necessarily D20)?

Salcor

use home written system and mostly try to write my own adventures, but often steal maps n names and stuff from others

Our adventures tend to go

1. Contact at the base space station / or some comms / or secondment / or adventure blunders into them, as an intro.
2. Intrique, investigation, contacty seeking, clue finding, offical bribing at either home station, or ship docked in station or close planetary body
3. clues send party on a journey / space battle / space anomaly / red tape gets in way of journey
4. 'dungeon' to explore in form of stricken ship, baddies base, board baddies ship, hidden factory, et al.

In course of adventure maybe introduce a new bit of tech, exotic weapon or armour, new monster, new species, new long term NPC for interaction.

Find there is a lot more skill rolls of all sorts, and slightly less combat as it can be so deadly.

JohnD

an example:

all summed up, for example this was the background to last nites scif fi d20. It is campaign specific.


Episode 16 The Raid
The team, in an effort to save credits, have pulled an extra shift of station protection during a down time in its power grid. Unfortunately this info has fallen into the wrong hands and an outlawed mercenary group have been paid by Dev’Lan to take advantage and attack the station through the E-gate, and also lay a minefield around the systems star.
Simultaneously a Size 3 mothership appears behind S’mahal I with the intent of setting up a probe array to monitor the system. Luckily for the party the station is aware of a planned raid and the station is only playing dead, and using the parties excellent ship and skills to its own advantage.

The party may
get annoyed with the station for this.
Attack either the raiders, or minelayers
They may notice injured raiders heading deeper into the system, not escaping through the E-gate at first.
They may catch the mothership ship off guard and attempt to raid it. This is bad as the mothership had a bomb planted on board by the Dev’Lan. It sort of went off at the instant the ship was leaving E-Space. It has torn a hole in the fabric of space and is stuck between two 'dimensions'. A foul creature of the E-Stream , a Za-Morhg (of a former pilot lost there centuries ago) is butchering the crew. The ships engines are ablaze and must be de-activated. Blowing the ship up is not an option as it will shred a massive gape in the system and potentially implode dragging the star in with it..

A good science fiction adventure

Well, it depends on the subgenre of science fiction you're talking about. Cyberpunk should have intrigue, noirish urban atmosphere, and interesting technology, whether in cyberspace or as potential gear/enhancements. Lethal combat, potential backstabbling, and a dystopian worldview are all par for the course here. Postapocalyptic settings share some of these characteristics, but with weirder mutants ("Shadowrun" blends some fantasy into all this).

Space opera should share some of the sense of wonder familiar to fans of high fantasy. Heroic missions, spectacular space battles, varied planets and aliens to encounter, and a good pace/party dynamic are key here. Swashbuckling personal combat, low Player Character mortality rates, and a somewhat lighter, more romantic tone are common in D20 settings such as Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, and Prime Directive/Star Fleet Battles/Star Trek. Each of these had some useful support.

"Hard" speculative fiction (such as "Traveller" or "Firefly/Serenity") should involve exploration, resource management, and careful maneuvering for long-term gain. The tone of the game can range from grim and gritty (like cyberpunk or the Old West) to antiseptic (but no less dangerous; see "2001: A Space Odyssey") to somewhere in between ("Blue Planet"). A smaller scale -- such as one or two planets in the not-to-distant future -- is also more likely than a galaxy-spanning epic.

An individual scenario should challenge each Player Character in different ways, whether it's the cyberpunk fixer trying to get some information out of a reluctant contact or a hotshot fighter pilot trying not to get shot down over some uncharted planet. The best adventures reward the entire team for its efforts. Exploring ancient ruins (easily ported from D&D), conducting a diplomatic first-contact mission (see "Trek"), or winning an interstellar war can all take multiple sessions. The old "Star Frontiers" game and D20 "Babylon 5" 2nd Ed. are excellent examples.

I myself like a mix of planetside "wilderness" adventures, urban (or starship-based or space station-based) intrigue, and classic "dungeon" crawls through enemy ships or bases. Bizarre mutations, mindbending substances and psionicists, and a wide range of gadgets and hostile aliens should allow for endless possibilities...