GreenTongue:
I guess it risks being a "Railroad" type of adventure but it seems to me that shore excursions can make good adventures.
I once ran a full on Railroad Campaign*, where in the PCs were on an actual railroad. Premise was a posse (two Texas Marshals, an Indian tracker, and a pair of gunfighters) got trapped on my version of the
Galaxy Express 999 after chasing a trio of short banditos (who turned out to be greys stealing cultural artifacts from Earth) onto the train. At every stop the PCs had so much time before the train left station again, so it was very much Stargate Universe, just I ran it about a decade before that show (I'd actually based my entire premise on a mashup of GE999, the western genre, and stole the variable time limit idea from
Sliders).
They had roughly 1 out of 4 of their adventures right there on the train between stops now that I think about it.
* Mostly because at the end of the previous campaign my Players complained about having "too much freedom" they wanted some more scripting, some rails to follow, so the game wouldn't bog down into a quagmire of Player Indecision. So they got what they asked for. That group never asked for rails again. :P