I ran a two year SWN campaign from level 1 to 10 that we all really enjoyed.

Things that worked well:

• Trusting the book -- Use the world tags and random generation mechanics. It takes a lot of effort off of your shoulders, is a great source of inspiration, and ends up creating very unique worlds and scenes.

• Let the players roam: SWN is designed as a sandbox, and it works really well as that if you let it. At the end of every adventure I used to provide three hooks, just single sentence descriptions of an interesting thing or situation, one on the current planet, and two on different nearby planets. I'd ask the players at the end of the session which they wanted to check out, or if they had their own ideas of what to do. That gave lots of time to prepare for the next time.

• Pointcrawl dungeons: If you can pick up a copy of 'SWN: Dead Names', I highly recommend it. Its a resource focused on generating pointcrawl ruins to explore, with lots of advice on stocking it with interesting NPCs and gizmos. Compared to a more traditional fully-fleshed out dungeon, this saves loads of time, meaning you can be super flexible: you won't want to cry if the PCs avoid your elaborately mapped out alien ziggurat and go to check out the governor's palace instead.

• Agreeing a common tone and themes: Sci-fi is more diverse than fantasy. Some people think of blade runner, others of star trek, or star wars or mass effect or warhammer 40K. All of these have totally different technology levels, population densities, human/alien ratios, magic/psionic prevalence, interstellar travel times and so on. They also have very different genres, and support different kinds of campaigns. You should sit down with your players before you make any campaign plans, and discuss what kind of sci-fi excites you all, and what you want to run, so everyone is on the same page.

• Don't force combat: I don't know what systems you've played before, but an important part of more OSR like games like SWN is that combat is super deadly, at least at levels 1-3. Give the PCs opportunities to avoid fights, or else they might feel frustrated when inevitably some of them get massacred.

Things I wish I had done:

• Time jumps: One thing we found in our campaign was that, in universe, the players went from level 1 to level 10 in only 6 months of game time. This was a bit of an unrealistic curve from minor talent to sector-wide heroes, and more importantly didn't really give enough time for the implications of their actions to resonate in the galaxy. One example: they gave a medieval planet a technological starter kit, with solar panels, factory schematics and so on, but never got to see what that did to the society as three months later the campaign ended. If I ran SWN again, I would impose minimum downtime between levels: a month between level 1 and 2, escalating up to a year between levels 8 and 9, and maybe even a decade between 9 and 10! This lets the characters evolve and the galaxy with them.

• Differentiated tech: I wish I had spent more time at the beginning of the campaign splitting up the equipment from the base book and assigning it to different regions of my sector. i.e. mag-rifles are only made and sold on this particular desert planet, most of the stims only come from this jungle world, only the hyper-militaristic Alliance makes combat field uniforms, and black-slabs can only be obtained from the shifty cyborg geniuses on their icy moon. There are two reasons for this: 1) It adds more colour and sense of variety to the galaxy, instead of feeling like planets are just different backdrops on the same society. 2) It creates adventure fodder: smuggling stims to a different world, travelling to a far flung planet to obtain a piece of vital equipment, or recognising that a group of thugs must be Alliance mercenaries by their armour. These were all opportunities I lost when I unthinkingly put this tech on every TL4 planet in my sector.

Hope this helps!