Just in case you guys were actually serious that Space combat is what killed STO for you.. (Maybe you were just jiving me, I dunno!) There is a way to play all-Ground.
I get like 1 hour of STO bandwidth a day for the next 10 days so I have distilled my STO experience down to Space battles, tradeskilling, and, keeping that duty roster icon from flashing by sending those guys on mishes. You can do almost the same thing I do except swap in ground battles and take out space battles.
Spacebattlewise I've been doing Patrol mishes and those random battles that pop up on the space map. I was joining the PVE queues but they are bandwidth munchers so I have to give them up for a little while. Patrol mishes give better but less loot than the random map battles. I would imagine this is due to the random battles set you to level 30 and the Patrol mishes seem to be at my level. Patrol mishes are harder than the random map battles, to me. Patrol mishes are solo - the random map battles can be solo... or your screen can fill up with help from other players or maybe just one or two other people pop in. They both give plenty good enough xp for me.
You can do a similar thing, Ground version. First off, I've never seen random map battles that are Ground battles - all the ones I have seen are Space battles. So you may not get to do a ground version of this. You can do Patrol mishes to your hearts content, tho, and it fits in well with keeping your ... duty officers(?) busy on mishes (as you travel) that can sometimes give pretty decent rewards. That Admiral progression stuff can be all Ground, too. I do the all Space version.
I don't know how active the PVE queues are. The Space version ones aren't so active. Probably because people are running queues I don't even know about yet. There are queues, for example, that pop up at level 50 I think it was. Those queues and the random map battle queues seem more populated than the PVE queues.
*shrug*
Anyway.. fwiw..
You can Ground mish your way all the way to 60 (is that the cap?) as far as I can tell, and tradeskill, and do the Admiral stuff, and the Duty Roster stuff. Basically, play a ground version of the game.
It's working for me! The space version anyway. if I was limited to just Patrols (I mostly just do those anyway due to I want the drops for my ship atm, ha) for the Space battle part I would probably be satisfied... sooo.... I was thinking even if you guys are limited to mostly just Patrols for the Ground battle part, it might work for you.
Patrol-tradeskilling is kinda a lot of fun to me for some reason.
Btw If you decide to try Patrol trade-mishering, there will be Space battles you have to skip, and, some space mishes are not battles at all. I just fly around and scan stuff. Basically, how you do it, is fly from system to system until you find one that has a Patrol mish. Accept the mish, then find out if it is Ground or Space. If it's Space, Exit, and go on to the next system. Meanwhile you are picking up new mishes in different areas of space for your Duty roster guys, and, your duty roster mishes and tradeskilling stuff is completing.
On the Space side, and especially after level 50, there are more queues to join but I don't have the bandwidth until this billing cycle ends to join them anyway so I'm mostly just doing a Space version of the above and it's been pretty fun so I thought I'd share.