Outstanding work, Striker. I did similar work when I took a class in High School on 3D Studio MAX. Mine was more along the lines of Armageddon, though. Big ole rock codenamed G.R.I.M. flying towards Earth, space fighters with the "G.R.I.M. Killer" torpedo fly out to blow it up, same ole story. Your work is very good for a first-time animation. Such praise, though, has to go hand in hand with some criticism:
To make the animation more noticeable, some particles might help. Watch the Kilrathi Saga or WC IV animation and you'll see debris, space dust/rocks, and all sorts of shiny things in the fore- and midgrounds. These particles also added some depth to the scene, making space more than just a bitmap mapped onto a sphere. Animating the particles around the scene (or the scene around the particles, either way) would give extra perceived motion to your fighters (they are going pretty fast, but they need a reference, ie stationary objects or particles).
A lot of the glows (on your Krants especially) tend to disappear entirely when their sources are obscured by an object. This happened to me once, and I remember either using a different glow technique or changing a setting to make the glow render regardless of it its source is obscured.
Finally, as cool as your star is, it has a bad habit of hiding objects in the scene. Because the scene includes the star in it, in usually means the main lighting of the scene is in the background, and the foreground is going to consist of a lot of shadowed sides. What might help this is adding another (less powerful) omni light. If you want to base it from something scientific, you can justify it by saying the star's light is reflecting off the planets, the fighters, (the particles... ;-) ), etc.
Other things (like glows wrapping around your Bengals when they warp in) are problems I ran into and can't remember how to solve. Good luck, and good work.
