What if you expanded an existing concept that already got codified in Pathfinder Second Edition.
They made distinct Modes of play, introducing Encounter, Exploration, and Downtime. All of these three are integral parts of all play as part of a core assumption of the game, although theoretically a GM could completely ignore one or two parts if they so chose to without necessarily breaking the game. (gladiatorial battles, or exploration and roleplay, or even a potentially rather weak economic story that might focus more on roleplay.)
What if these Modes of play could be expanded and seen as default scenes or backdrops. This sort of already exist with the idea of chase rules for instance. But what if when you open the game up to a new backdrop/scene type, it may expand the game, and player creation a bit.
Adding the aspect to the game may include an option to help reduce the strain of splitting resources for your player. Something akin to how SoT gave everyone Free-Archetype for one of two multi-class archetypes.
So Playing with Starship backdrop/mode may add some skills that are needed to make starship combat and navigation work that would otherwise just become handwaved details. So there might be an optional rule allowing each player to pick a starting role, which gives them a list of a couple skills (like one of the new ones) that they get to advance to trained. There could be feats with a [starship] trait, that you can hand out for free at some interval. Some of these feats might also have traits making them class feats for some classes if they want to invest in them as a class investment.
If you aren't going to bother with ship encounters (other than settings for your personal encounters) you don't need to touch those feats, skills, or rules. But if you do, you have a way to expand your characters into it while giving them some choices.
To clarify, I'm not saying that you are hard-coded required to only be able to do the job you selected for your 'starship' background. But by having one for free, it helps you insure you have some competency to fulfil that role if need be if you aren't otherwise invested in other resources making you good at another role.
This could also be used to leverage modes/backdrops for mechs and other vehicles, or even more appropriately, if they wanted to introduce a mode for netrunning/grid/matrix universe style adventures. Ensuring that any player could participate, no matter what class they are playing. [yes, this is also presuming they would all want to]
An obvious option for dealing with someone who plays a 'barbaric warrior' character whom is considered primitive, and not able to use technological systems, who doesn't want their character to participate in 'crewing' the ship, because they feel it is out of character. One alternative is simply to have them switch to playing an individual that is different and normally and NPC during those scenes.
But the concept being that the new mode of play, expands the game, and in doing so, may expand the options/choices selected in building their character. It goes along well with the concept of Opt-in complexity. It could be that base rules might include the skills, but it could be that in most cases there would be no need to invest in those skills, so the baseline skill allotment doesn't need to account for people picking them. However in a NetRunning campaign, you might need to accommodate for everyone being at least trained in computers, so that might become a 'presumption' in the baseline when that decision is made, and everyone starts with Trained in Computers in that setting.
Guidelines could exist to deal with how to enable the game for multiple extra Modes (say you want to have, Starship encounters, NetRunning encounters, and Economic encounters/subsystem in your campaign). Recommendations might be given how to best incorporate multiple baseline assumptions from the new modes, while perhaps limiting the free feats to pick one from one of the modes, not getting a free one per mode for instance to keep people from getting overwhelmed with keeping track of the choices they made, while letting people chose some roles to excel in.
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An obvious option for dealing with someone who plays a 'barbaric warrior' character whom is considered primitive, and not able to use technological systems, who doesn't want their character to participate in 'crewing' the ship, because they feel it is out of character. One alternative is simply to have them switch to playing an individual that is different and normally and NPC during those scenes.
Star Trek Adventures has a rule for doing this. If your character doesn't fit the current situation you can switch to play someone else on the crew. This only works if you have a ship big enough to have an extra crew. But even on a smaller ship having room for 1 or 2 extra crew members could help a lot, it's not likely that every member of the party will be out of place for ship combat.
For organized play where having more than one character would be an issue. Using pregen characters could work.
Unless you always park your ship in a secure neighborhood, it's not a bad idea to have an extra character or NPC or pregen to stay with the ship.
Like having an AI program/NavComputer, maintenance bot/R2 unit, droid/Holo Doctor, deck crewman/Red Shirt, Jawa/mascot/baby yoda/ship's cat/familiar/cabin boy/digi-poke-mon in specific game modes in spaceship/mech combat or net running through the matrix?
Works for me! I like it!