I know a lot of people would just skip traveling time but It can also be a good roleplaying opportunity and chance to practice having characters talking to each other in a casual fashion as friends and people would most definitely do when being so tight knit

What has been a scenario you have played while idle on a ship?

Clean / mod weapons.

Workout / sparring.

Arts / crafts / hobbies.

Research / interrogation.

Cooking / chores.

Gambling.

Losing an argument to some droids (who we only stole on a lark) about whether it was moral to keep wiping their memory.

Fight an insurrection.

Hunt for bugs.

Hunt for sabotage droids.

Argue about who gets to wake my character up with bad news, loudly enough to wake her.

Think about stuff you've done on a long trip on a bus / train / aeroplane.

Reread your post. The yeller stuff above were actual scenario elements.

The tracking stuff came up a lot - at one point we had 5 devices aboard from different factions.

The sabotage droids... were little spidery things that we had to hunt down and disable.

The insurrection was a disgraced Moff. We'd been told by someone we couldn't turn down to bring him to one system (he thought we were going to another) while another person we couldn't say "no" to (some ginger imperial bint) told us to take him to a different location entirely. Rock and a hard place, yeah? So we decided to do him in and claim he'd tried to take over the ship. Only he suspected a double cross and double crossed us before we got a chance to betray him (some people are so suspicious). It was fun.

Think about stuff you've done on a long trip on a bus / train / aeroplane.

i.e. quietly stare the back of the chair in front of you and hope that your stomach won't flush?

Think about stuff you've done on a long trip on a bus / train / aeroplane.

i.e. quietly stare the back of the chair in front of you and hope that your stomach won't flush?

C'mon, B3NDR - that's NPC talk!

Surf the internet...

It would be unfortunate if your ship had an unexpected gizka infestation...

GM: "You've got a few days of travel time before you reach the drop off. What are you doing?"

Group: *low grumble*

GM: "Come on."

Me: "I'll keep doing research into those weird chemicals we found on board the Ignorance and Betrayal."

GM: "You said you downloaded the Alliance's latest medical database, right? Sure, give me a roll."

(Failure, but with two Advantages and a Triumph.)

GM: "All right, you still can't figure out what they're using the chemicals for, but you've finally identified what the chemicals actually are. What's more, you're pretty sure that with this information you could develop a biochemical augmentation to a cybernetic attachment of your choosing. That's assuming you can manage to figure out what the Imperials were doing with this stuff in the first place."

Me: "That's awesome!"

(GM rolls behind his screen.)

GM: "However, you got so caught up in research that you forgot you were sitting in the common area, and Tess' character has been staring at you for a full half-hour."

Tess: "Sup?"

It basically turned into natural roleplaying from there. Find stuff your characters are doing with their own B-plots, choose one or two of them to focus on, and have them work towards a resolution or at least the next turning point in their stories.

I use down times to roll up back stories as revealed in quiet conversations.

A passenger's pet nexu kitten left bits of dismembered jawas in annoying, hard to get places.

They'll be picking those chunks out for a while and don't think the occasional smell of rotten meat/wet rat will ever quite go away. The easy solution is to get the nexu back in the ship, let it get hungry enough that it'll go nom on its meat stashes, the compounded problem though is not the smell with a hungry nexu onboard.

When I am playing, used to fleece the more stupid members of the crew at sabaac, but even the most stupid have eventually caught onto that so its slim pickings for easy credits. So, mostly make up gizmos, do some maintenance, do very little and go hang out in engineering with computer.

"You just beat the high score on the Simulator in the Dorsal Turret, and defeated the Ko'Dan armada"

I had a character who was a budding freelance starship designer working for a small independent merchant fleet, though I've actually had a number of PCs that fit that description over the decades, in an old D6 game. Anyway in that campaign which was around 16 ABY at the time, Hyrotii Corporation was trying to expand into manufacturing small and midsize capital warships for independent planets and private security firms (Plus rich pirate and outlaw groups almost certainly). They commissioned my character to draw up a frigate design for them/ Not long afterwards, while he was in the early phases of the design the group was hired to help rescue the survivors of a wrecked Corona class Frigate (Line class not Armed class) and on the way back my character spent most of the trip asking the officers and engineer questions about what the main advantages and weak points of the design was and how they would fix them. Most of the npcs wanted nothing to do with his questions but a few were grateful enough for the rescue to talk to him and answer the questions, albeit in general terms rather then specifics.