Thoughts on the Next Campaign

With Southern Reaches moving along, I've started giving thought to what my next campaign will be like.  I've got two ideas:

1. Updating the Table Map for the Southern Reaches and running the next generation of adventurers in the same area.
2. Setting aside fantasy altogether and running a West Marches style science fiction game, likely using the Traveller rules (the current version from Mongoose).

Part of the intent behind Idea 1 is the incorporation of what I've learned running the Southern Reaches.  This would include adding additional towns and spreading civilization a bit further afield.  One of the issues I've found with the current set up is a lack of people for the PCs to talk to other than each other.  By scrolling time forward a decade or two I can add new settlements and make some other changes to the maps, like adding rivers in the Sea of Grass, something the current map distinctly lacks.  Rivers would allow exploring PCs to move farther faster as rivers provide ready-made "paths" to follow.

Idea 2 is something I've discussed with the Verden DM (Hello, Kyle!) - starting the PCs with a small ship on a frontier world with newly discovered (or RE-discovered) worlds as the adventure locales.  I have an idea where a couple hundred years prior to the campaign start a stellar empire collapsed under external and internal pressures.  Things are slowly being put back together again and the PCs would start out with an old starmap showing old trade/communication routes and world names.  The PCs would be explorer/traders, looking to find what is out there now and make a buck off of it, possible bringing lost worlds back into the fold or establishing new polities.  Or maybe looking for Old Tech to sell or use.  Still mulling this one over.

Current plans use the Traveller system, but I need to sit down and read it before making any decisions.  I might use a different system and just crib the Traveller spaceship tech, depend on how easy it is to add alien species.  I'm envisioning using D&D races as alien race templates and seeing what develops out of that.  The thought of space kobolds/goblins as ship technicians warms my heart a bit.  I'm slowly building a wiki of ideas and am contemplating calling the space campaign either "Fragments" (a new idea) or "Found Worlds" (recycling the name of my short 4E campaign).