yes. yes it is weird. whenever you leave GSB on for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time, and you have mods installed, the game seems to go crazy. when you select a mission, sometimes the little picture on the choose mission screen for that mission is a flashing picture of the chart of letters for one of your fonts. and when i click the deploy the fleet button, the original backround pops up for a second, but then it turns into the box_backround (found in data/ui folder) and the enemy fleet gets really distorted. some ships appear as giant boxes, or some fighter squadrons turn into extremely large 1-fighter squadrons. (the fighter is VERY big) and when you click fight, the load screen is again, a chart of your fonts only this time, it’s popping up like crazy. and when i press any key when its done loading, all hell breaks loose. lots of things can happen at this point: on my survival, attack of the fighters, i used a HELL of a lot of cruisers, all equipped with primarily anti-fighter cannons. (i’ve learned since then that flak cannons are better :P) the screen went CRAZY during the fight. sometimes, a GIGANTIC fighter appeared to come out of hyperspace, then disappear. also, sometimes in the fight, the screen darkened until it was totally black, with only bullets and lasers showing. then it went bright again. it was REALLY CRAZY. that only happens in survival. in a scenario, lots of things can also happen: the wretched runtime error message, (NOT BECAUSE OF FIGHTERS, we’re moving on to something, say, like gravity well) because the boxes or the fonts, or, the entire screen is enveloped in a gigantic weapons chart, you can’t see the ships, or the radar, or anything, but you can still select your ships, you can still click everything. the last thing is this. you know how i said there were huge fighters seen on deployment? well, in the battle, they’re turned into boxes of weapon charts. same for the other boxes. it’s INSANE! I think the overload caused the game to go haywire, but i can’t be sure, because it seems to be quite rare, and happens randomly. very weird…
I’m suspecting that your computer is actually overheating and the game isn’t going all wonky.
It could be your graphic card overheating because usually graphic card’s problems appear as visual errors. Check that your computer has properly working cooling and isn’t covered in dust. 
well, the last parts i’m sure aren’t happening. but yes, i think i just pushed the graphics a little too far with attack of the fighters. but what about the other one? it seems to happen most with lucifer’s nebula. and i don’t overheat anything with THAT one. BTW the LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time on thing isn’t a factor anymore.
an example of what i’m talking about can be found here: (study the hulk closely)
Those look like modded fighters. Is the bug reproducible with just the vanilla game without anything modded? Something might have got corrupted mod-wise.
yeah, i purposely put those fighters in so you could get a picture of whats happening. 
i don’t know about the vanilla part. the bug is hardly easy is reproduce, so i can’t say for sure. this doesn’t bother me very much, because all i have to do is restart the game and boom, it goes away. even when i have mods installed. anyway, i checked the files for everything and they look a-ok. i agree with Mr. Weedy, i think i just overloaded the game and such.
I think your graphic card or drivers aren’t properly reading the image files and/or are messing with image coordinates and/or are messing the alpha mapping and that’s end result. Or it simply could be the game and it can’t handle all that stuff going on so it messes up the calculations.
That image is filled with visual errors. For example that one diving suit looking like ship is repeated there 3 times and you can clearly see that the image of it isn’t correctly aligned so the cockpit of it rolls over to the behind of the image. ALSO notice how there are 3 a lot smaller images of the same ship too.
yes, i’m now sure that it is overloading, because the hulk belonged to an imperial imperator (maybe legion) cruiser.
uh, it’s not a diver’s suit. it’s an imperial ballista fighter. xD the reason why there are lots of smaller images of it is because they’re SUPPOSED to be there. have you even gotten to the empire yet?
AHA! I’ve finally caught that dreaded black screen. here it is:
