Friendly faction ships (not escorts) will be all too eager to blow up that Kestrel you've painstakingly disabled after several minutes of combat. Similarly, escorts can be overzealous in missions that require you to disable but not destroy your targets.
Escorts can be ordered to disable ships but they will not stop firing until the ship is disabled. So if it takes a couple of seconds for missiles to reach the target there will be a couple of seconds worth of Macross Missile Massacre on it's way to destroy the ship.
Awesome Music: For just three tracks in the series that plays every start up in the respective titles, players get this feeling. Two of them were original, Nova however, uses Mars, The Bringer Of War by Gustav Holst, an eight minute track for a loading and menu screen that last about six or so seconds. (Presuming you don't read the intro)
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: If you spell "Vell-os" any other way, with any other capitalization, on EVN forums, you will be rather pointedly corrected.
Several common tactics take advantage of the games' rudimentary and blindly aggressive AI:
The "Monty Python maneuver" (named for the "Run away!" line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) is a tactic for destroying pursuing ships by accelerating to top speed, and then reversing direction to fire backwards along the direction of travel (possible because Escape Velocity has inertia in spaceflight).
The "Not the Nine O'Clock News maneuver" is a way to penetrate a blockade during story missions that involves kiting the enemies away from the target planet, and then either doubling back or (Nova only) flying to the edge of the map whereupon you cross to the opposite side.
The "Qaanol maneuver" is a tactic devised by Nova forum member Qaanol for conquering planets. It consists of flying a Polaris Manta with no weapons or armor and maxed-out speed and agility, and involves kiting the swarms of enemy ships into an escort of Ravens or other similarly powerful ships.
"Mass-modding" involves converting a freighter into a Q-ship. Start with freighter with decent stats like an Enterprise or Leviathan, the bigger the cargo bay the better. Buy mass expansions until you can't fit any more. You now have a smaller cargo bay and a lot more room for weapons.
Federation, Auroran, and Pirate ships are pretty evenly matched (a forum member reported he once took out a Federation Carrier using a mass-moddednote start with a decent size freighter, then convert the majority of the cargo bay into room for weapons Pirate Enterprise rigged for More Dakka), but Polaris ships eat them all for lunch. In particular, the Feds and Aurorans have absolutely no counter for the Raven.
Also the Manta, mainly because it's the only fighter in Nova that can do appreciable damage to capital ships without modification. In addition to being blindingly fast and agile, it mounts a Bio-Relay Laser, which is easily a light capital ship weapon.
Supposedly (going by the in-game ship description) the Federation can counter at least the Polaris capital ships using the unlockable RAGE Gunboat. In practice however it's just an uninspired heavy fighter whose ill-defined "reactive" armor ability does little to protect it.
In Nova, you can run luxury goods from Europa (Medium price) to Earth (High price). Not game breaking by itself considering the low margin, except for the fact that they're both in the same system. An hour or two of doing this and you'll have all the credits you will ever need. There was another system that had a similar situation, and Override had used it too, but in those cases it was set so the two worlds were placed at quite some distance in systems crawling with pirates quite happy to try to relieve you of your ship and cargo. Earth and Europa are in Sol, one of the safest systems in the galaxy.
Out of the incredible Polaris arsenal, the Polaron Torpedo is particularly ridiculous. It's fast, does enormous damage, can't be stopped by any other race's countermeasures (both jamming and point-defense systems), has near-perfect tracking and lasts for far longer than any other secondary weapon before burning out. It doesn't even take up mass, so you can carry dozens of them on even a gunboat. Of course, if that wasn't bad enough they also get a version for capital ships which releases several of the damned things at once.
Good Bad Bugs: The "Machine Gunning" bug causes the Vell-os Summer Bloom attack to be more powerful than programmed In Nova, and more efficient than Winter Tempest.
That One Level: "Distract Moash" in Nova. You need to land on a space station while not letting too many of your escorts die. Between you and the station is a massive amount of Moashi ships. You're likely to die from gunfire before you can slow down enough to land.
Best solution is the Not the Nine O'Clock NewsManeuver. Jump in, then fly away from the planet to lure the blockade away, then double back around them.
Most fun solution is to save this mission for late in the game, when you can take on the enemy fleet single-handedly. Nova has regrettably few scripted opportunities to fight so many powerful ships at once.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Or at least a Perfectly Good Way To Make Money. The official timeline for Nova mentions that scientists discovered the chemical TCTLIDS in deep space, then created the narcotic FATE accidentally when they tried to make medicines with it. But no mention of TCTLIDS or FATE is found in the game files.
. Start with freighter with decent stats like an Enterprise or Leviathan, the bigger the cargo bay the better. Buy mass expansions until you can't fit any more. You now have a smaller cargo bay and a lot more room for weapons.