Thought I'd throw this out there for general discussion.
Long story short, my good friend/co-GM and I are thinking of getting back to Trek and co-running a campaign. We've had great luck with this in the past and know we'll do well again. However.
The trick this time is that at the moment, we have just three players interested in playing the campaign full-time, including ourselves. We have two other players who don't want to commit to a long-term Trek game and will likely only be at occasional sessions, sort of as guest star characters or recurring role characters or the like.
So, with the possibility of only expecting three PCs at any given session (two of which are part-time GM characters), we're not sure our traditional and preferred campaign style based on a large Starfleet ship will quite work for such a small crew of players at the table.
I'm thinking we could do a smaller vessel with a smaller crew, or a larger ship with a whole bunch of NPC department heads and other officers, or something else. We're not sure yet, just tossing ideas around. We do know we prefer ship-based campaigns that allow the ship to have the potential for interaction with the majority of the major Alpha and Beta Quadrant species, and we prefer the TNG/DS9/VOY eras as setting.
What sorts of campaigns have you run where you only had a couple of reliable players at any given session? Did you do a starship campaign, a station-based game, something else? What other sorts of campaign ideas would work in Trek?