Twice now, I have been flying a Centaur MkIII with 100% health, and all of a sudden I have been destroyed by a bot. No registering of hits being made on me, no sign of my health dropping below 100%.

Once was in a regular roid sector, and I was killing bots in my normal fashion, then I'm a cloud of vapour.

The second time was in an Ion Storm, I was flying along, having killed some bots, watching my radar and pressing x regularly, when BOOM. Still at 100% health, no sign of a bot anywhere near me, and then I'm dead.

Sounds like lag. What do you get when you type /ping in the console? How are you connecting to the internet?

I have a 512k ADSL connection, and my ping is bewteen 130 and 140, with no other programs running that access the net.

Oye this is true. when you go into an Ion Storm non of the bots show on radar!!!!!! You see them on the list but non insight so when I jumped into another storm same thing I decided to look for the bots I stood still in one part of the sector I heard the bots Turboing in But non on my RADAR!!!! Not only that several times while botting in a different sector the game crashed on me twice blah! what going on?

Part of the new update. Storms cut your radar range to 500m.

Accepted that storms reduce radar to 500m, but the second time it happened, I wasn't in a storm...

<sarcasm>
The devs are probably testing the new serco stealth capability.
</sarcasm>

Odd, your connection sounds identical to mine, and whilst I do get some lag/jumps it is not in any way life-threatening. Do you get any packetloss? vroomfondel.guildsoftware.com seems like a good ping target... Also you could try changing the only networking option in existance!

Now that i read back over it, it does sound more like packet loss or a bad connection between you and Guild (usually your ISP or your cable/dsl modem). If your connection drops, all kinds of odd stuff can happen until it either a) comes back or b) you get timed out and get to log in to find out what happened to your ship.