Well, it's a very nice one-volume SFRPG. It was released in the 3.0 era and perhaps leaned a bit too heavily on its parent games (shares some foibles of both classic traveller and 3.0), and could use some brush-ups, but ultimately very complete and very usable.
Don't know what your friend might be on about, Plane Sailing, unless they were a D20 hater, too. Combat is not particularly complicated compared to standard D20, and considering that more emphasis on ranged weapons decrease the role of Attacks of Opportunity, it's a bit less complicated in play.
The Ship Combat rules are one of my favorite set of rules for spacecraft combat in RPGs on small ships with PCs as crew, because it deliberately creates important combat roles for the whole crew instead of just letting the pilot and gunners do all the work while everyone else sets back and twiddles their thumbs.
