Insectoid Banter:
Well, Pull my wings off and call me “Larva”…
Stuff my Spiracles
Plait my antennae
Scratch my chitin
Rub my wingcase
That one’s for Raid/Vapona/Ant Powder/Magnifying Glasses/Mothra/“Them”/“I’m a Celebrity”
If there is a pd-enabled ship within range of a missile:
Enemy missiles detected, point defence systems activating.
If cooperative order is enabled:
Concentrate all fire on (enemy ship name here)!
Empire battle cry:
For the Emperor!
One of my favorite lines from B5 seems appropriate here: Initiating…getting the hell out of here maneuver.
I second this.
It might be nice to have a ship-specific chatter window come up when you select a ship, perhaps right about the modules window in the lower right. This window could contain a brief summary of what the ship is currently doing.
“Moving to engage [Target]” for normal movement.
“Attacking [Ship’s] target” for ships acting under the Cooperative order.
“Returning to formation” for ships attempting to maintain a Formation order.
“Covering [Ship]” for ship’s acting under the Protector order.
And so on.
This way you’d have the useful, ship-specific chatter in a place where it can easily be found and where you’ll know exactly which ship it applies to, while the entertaining fluff chatter stays up top and always visible.
"All red shirts please report to duty stations…everyone else ABANDON SHIP!!!
Thirded. The banter has two roles to play - to amuse us, and as a sneaky way to inform us of information about what’s happening ‘under the hood’ of the game. Giving us this sort of info via the guise of battle chatter is a brilliant way to keep the game cinematic, but appease the inner-geeks that need to know if our orders actually do anything 
It’s like how we don’t get information about enemy ships when we click on them, but we can duduce most of what we’d see there just by looking at the state of the ship. Point defense turrets on fire? presses fingers together Eeeeeeeexcellent.
Shes gonna blow messages.
“nononono do not push the big red button!”
“SOMEBODY SHOOT THAT INTERN!”
Hand me that fire extinguisher, my wig just cought fire
OEMF!
Oh you´re never going to believe this, I just cought myself a jamming missile!
Can someone please turn of that damn allarmsignal, mán that´s annoying!
Ehrw, I just woke up, what´s that allarmsignal for anyway? Hello? …Anybody hooom?
Psaw, I´m the last one left!
Let´s find that last escape pod…
And I was having súch a nice drea…
Squadron chatter.
Squadron, activate targeting laser!
Oke fella´s fire those missiles! Fire mission Fire mission!
I love it when a plan comes together!
Ah! they got James, I had a gambling debt with James…now…not anymore I don´t
Jup, we come in pieces…
This could be the end of a beautifull friendship…
When engaging repair units: “No…THAT one goes HERE, THIS one goes THERE!”
Down to one cruiser: “CQ, CQ. . .”
Upon initiating a turn: “MY LEFT! MY LEFT!” alternatively “No! Your OTHER LEFT!”
When enemy is just outside of range band for a weapon: “Almost. . .there. . .”
At the very start of a battle: “Turbines to power. . .engines to speed.”
At 1% damage remaining: “You arrogant ass. You’ve killed US!”
I am literally LOLing from your ship-chatter suggestions. Outstanding choice of source material, my good sir. In that vein…
Just before firing Swarm Disruptors (complete with awesome beam-convergence effect) : “Commencing primary ignition…”
Imperial ship coming into max weapons range of Rebel player : “Sir, Rebel ship entering our sector! --Good, our first catch of the day…”
Upon sighting enemy fighters at start of a battle : “We count at least 30 enemy craft, but they’re so small that they’re evading our Turbo-Lasers.”
When you lose your first cruiser to enemy fire : “This will get out of control! It will get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it!”
And so forth… 
Love it!
In the same spirit, I’d love ‘Lock S-foils in attack position’ and ‘Good shot Janson!’
Might be copyright issues though
Where can we find the text file with the chatter suggestions? if we knew where that was, we could move this to the Mod subforum and just make these part of a mod
It’s inside Gratuitous Space Battles\data folder and the file is named comms.ini.
There’s already a mod heavily increasing the number of communication messages here
I’d like to see some faction-based lines.
Like Federation ships being destroyed giving a message like “Damn, this is coming out of MY paycheck!”