Animating the ships

To animate the ships, I decided to draw a line (the line under the splines option) to mark the route I wanted the ships to fly around the asteroid field. I then used the patch constraint tool to get the ship to move along the path I had chosen.

While that worked well at getting the ship to move in the right direction, it did not rotate the ship to face the right way or make it bank around the corners. To do this I used the auto key function on it, and went through the animation rotating and banking the ships (using the rotate tool) to make it look like they are actually flying. To help make this easier, I set the view from global to local so that the same axis always rotated it the same way, e.g. the y-axis would always bank the ship.

2 of the ships banking

For when the ship crashes into an asteroid, I put a keyframe there and then removed the rest of the path it was following so that the ship would stop inside the asteroid therefore hiding it from view. To simulate the explosion I used a bright yellow light that would flash in a similar way to an explosion would.

Light explosion