Hmmm.... There's really not a consistant thing, except I always seem to be
near something when it happens-- in close combat, going through a nebula, that kind of stuff. But when I restart from my autosave and engage the same bad guys/take the same course, it doesn't repeat...
I'm thinking it might be caused by my models- I kept trying to scale them relative to one another in appearance before I realized that the scale can be controlled by modifying the values in the SpaceObjects_XFiles.txt. Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow...