Seen three times in two games.
Steps that triggered the crash.

1.8.1, CC, Taipan GodShip
Started new game.
God-jumped to Rigel and got insurance.
God-jumped to Silla.
Changed standard heavy Iocrym armor for light titanium armor and disabled Iocrym veil.
God-moved to Anton's position.
Placed the playership about 10ls NE of Anton. Used the Taipan god features to create a Death Drugs Cartel station. This created the station at (sysVectorPolarOffset gPlayership 45 15) so the playership was situated directly between Anton and the enemy station.
As the Meth Enforcers undocked and attacked, Anton fired on them. The playership was in the way and was hit by fire, both Antons and the Enforcers and destroyed. This triggered the crash as described below. sav file available for this game.

As the playership is destroyed a rapid oscillation of the screen image is triggered. Approximately 10 to 30 cycles of a fraction of a second 'shake' the screen image. It appears as a vibration of the screen and lasts between slightly less than 1 second to approximately 2 seconds. I suspect it is cycling the same section of screen image repeatedly but it is difficult to tell.
The game then crashes and shows the standard "game has crashed, please send sav and log, etc" screen with the same values as the relevant crash reports.
After that it gives a standard "Windows has encountered a problem, send an MS error report?" window.

In the first game where it occurred, I reloaded the crashed game and was able to replicate the crash in the restarted game.

"Accidently destroyed by Anton" and "Destroyed by a Meth Enforcer" are two messages seen on the screen as it is shaking.

The common factor seems to be Anton's weapons fire hitting the playership, or perhaps the playership wreck. There isn't any data to back this up though, only a very quick glimpse of the crash happening. If I had to guess I would say that when one of Anton's shots hits the playership shortly after it has been destroyed, either by Anton or another object, the crash is triggered.

Big hat-tip to Alandra for mentioning that Anton might be involved.

george moromisato 22 Apr 2019:

Awesome! That's really good info and it helped me track down the bug.

I could reproduce the problem as follows:

  1. Get insurance.
  2. Have Anton kill you, and make sure you leave a wreck.
  3. Make sure there is a second shot that instantly destroys the wreck.

I simulated the above by using (sysCreateWeaponFire ...) to create multiple shots aimed at the player.

The actual bug happened as follows:

  1. Player is killed, but due to insurance, the player ship stays around.
  2. A wreck is created and the POV (screen Point-of-View) is set to the wreck.
  3. The wreck is destroyed, but now we try to move the POV back to the player, because it's still around.
  4. Unfortunately, the player is not in a valid state (still inside the destroy code) so the POV code rejects the player ship and sets the POV to NULL instead.
  5. A NULL POV crashes the game.

The fix is to detect that the player ship is not quite valid and set the POV to a marker. Later, when the player is resurrected (by insurance) we will set the POV to the player.

I've made a fix in 1.8.2 (and released it).

Please try your save file in 1.8.2 and see if it fixes it. Please re-open if it doesn't.