I knew this particular scene/page of the story was going to be the most annoying one to do, because it was a space battle.

Space is a real problem. That's why Quitclaim stories don't have more space scenes. First off, space is nearly impossible to light well. Second, space battles and maneuvers don't look as good as you think they will, even if you light them right. It's the kind of thing that doesn't translate well into still images, and usually if you're not very careful, you just end up with a cluttered panel where you can barely tell who's firing on whom.

What I was not expecting was that space had decided it was going to crash the renderer tonight.

Not really crashes, in the sense of the program going "oops no" and puking and dying. These were cases where the renderer got stuck. Uninterruptible and unresponsive while its confused little brain was trying to figure things out.

Two of these crashes, though, were a case of it getting stuck in a place I'd never gotten stuck before. I often cut the renders off after a certain amount of time, see. You press Cancel, but once you do, you've still got the render it managed to do up to that point, and you can go ahead and save that. Except, this time, it got stuck after I canceled the render and wouldn't ever let me get to a point where I could save the result.

I lost probably an hour and a half tonight, waiting to see if it would recover from stuck (sometimes it does, but usually not) and then redoing the work I'd lost because I hadn't saved in a while before it got stuck. And for the two weird times, I actually had to delete something from the scene in order to keep it from losing its mind.

So, anyway, I hate space and I'm glad that page is done now.