A couple of things of note -
It seems like characters are either good or bad at combat. If you are running a character of the Military class (either officer or enlisted man), you start out with a 12 for your combat skill; everyone else gets a 6. This is a HUGE delta that is noticeable in the game. One of our players ran a Gorran security officer with a high strength, so his combat was like 15. The rest of our players were running human navigation/engineering/communication officers, and we had one doctor, so all of them had combat in the 5-7 range. So our Gorran's chances to hit were 75%, versus everyone else's 25%-35%. Couple that with the damage bonuses that the Gorran got from his high strength and he was waaaaay more effective in combat (both melee and ranged) than everyone else in the party. While I agree that Military / Security officers should be generally better at combat than other classes, one would think that in order to make it through Spacefleet Academy, all officers would need to complete a certain amount of combat training, so the delta feels weird. Furthermore, it made gaming less fun for the other classes.
We house-ruled some combat changes, most notably the addition of grappling. Essentially a grapple check is a combat check, only you do no damage. If you succeed, the other character is grappled. Grappled characters can do nothing except attempt to break the grapple (a muscle check, opposed by the grappler’s muscle bonus). Grapplers may attack their grappled target as a normal combat check (using damage of whatever weapon they have in hand), or may attempt to slam the grappled target into a wall or other object as a normal combat check with damage of 1d4. This seemed to work out very well.
Another house rule that worked out well for us was non-lethal damage. All damage from non-lethal sources (e.g. unarmed combat) was ruled to be “temporary damage” that automatically healed at the end of the scene. Characters reduced to 0 hp through non-lethal damage were unconscious, but not in danger of dying. This also worked out very well, as it gave players a means of incapacitating characters without killing them.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Stephen