All right, hear me out!
What if we just took totally standard D&D3.5 characters and made them well...star fighters?
No or very few major rules changes-everything is still base. Just instead of playing solely a character, you'd be a character piloting a combat craft and your stats would represent the combined abilities of pilot and craft, making them interchangeable for any scenario. I mean, maybe I'm crazy but, almost everything would work if you fluff it differently. Trip attempts could become ramming or stun weapons, for example. Strength becomes not of your characters arm, but of his ability to fight in close combat. A Guisarme (a melee reach weapon that can trip in usual D&D) becomes a medium range ionic cannon capable of making a ship 'prone'-or in this case, off balance. A longbow becomes a missile launcher that can strike from afar.
Casters would fair little different, with their ships being specialized instead of generic-spells become technical abilities. Instead of sleep, electromagnetic shutdown. Magic missile becomes a homing torpedo. Charm and control spells become hacking attempts to override a ships controls-opposed by your will save, which is a combination of both your own ships defenses and your personal level of self control.
It would have a heavily simplified combat field-front, middle, and rear for two sides. Which is admittedly the weakest part of the whole idea. Shelving movement and maneuvering for a pbp format. Though we sort of do that anyway, it would certainly take some of the strategic aspect away from the game.
Obviously, some things wouldn't work. Druids Wildshaping, almost certainly not-though, I'd love to hear some idea. Some races special abilities would be difficult to implement-though, not impossible. 'Elven' Ships would use the same bonus stats as Elven Characters would. Morality and related would be improbable to implement-and likely replaced with a basic factional system that corresponds to the alignments of good and evil...
Well, tell me if any of this peaks anyones interests. Would anyone even want to play such a game?