Traditionally, Traveller space combat is nothing like that imagined by Hollywood. Battles can rage over hundreds of thousands of kilometres, over a period of many hours. The enemy are too far away to be visible to the naked eye as anything other than bright specks of light when they fire their drives.
With 1000 second turns, and 10,000km as the base unit of distance, comes a problem. Player characters aren't playing a board game (or a tactical wargame), pitting fleets of dozens of ships against each other, but are more probably mercenaries or traders in a single small ship. If space combat occurs, it will be small scale actions, often around a planet or moon. At the Traveller scale, planets and moons are barely obstacles.
Docking Bay 94
Take the stereotypical SF situation - a group of PCs shoot their way past guards at the spaceport, and quickly take off, accelerating away from the planet in order to reach a safe distance to Jump. Whether they can escape depends on how long it takes local defences to mobilise, and how quickly the PCs can run.
With a 17 minute turn, the authorities will have mobilised their defences by the 2nd turn. With weapon ranges in the tens of thousands of kilometres, a single patrol cruiser in orbit can cover all escape vectors from the planet. There's no opportunity to try and time the escape to avoid ships in orbit. For me, this doesn't fit well with a role playing game.
Yags SciFi
There are a number of computer games which model how I imagine a vaguely hard SF style of might look, notably Eve. The distance between warships is measured in tens of kilometres (sometimes more, sometimes less), and though it's not the twitch combat of something like Star Wars, it is relatively action orientated.
For this reason, my version of Traveller uses something similar, and the Yags space combat system uses the kilometre as the base unit of distance, with combat turns of 10 seconds.
What does this mean? Firstly, planets are big. They can be used to hide behind, making it possible to play cat and mouse with patrol cruisers in orbit, or even planetary defence installations. It also provides more of a requirement for small ships, or even fighters, to cover a wider volume of space. A small free trader is more likely to survive battle with a couple of fighters than it is a navy patrol cruiser.
Turns are shorter, so the action is a bit more intense. Fighter combat doesn't quite make sense with 15 minute turns (it works fine in a wargame - roll a die, see how many fighters in the squadron dies), but with short turns it's a bit more action orientated, with a chance to run away or surrender if things start going badly.