NonesuchPlace:

It's been a little while now and I'm still curious about helping you with this board/card game idea.  Have you collected the rules you were talking about before?  Can they be posted on some sort of download site for us to take a look at, or would you prefer to share them via email instead?  I'm not sure if I was entirely clear in my previous post, but I had wanted to take a look at the rules in order to get a feel for what kinds of game components to make before I started working on such.

That is really the approach that I have taken with game-making in the past.
I'll start going through my HDDs to find the pdfs of the game, and the notes that I have.  I'd like some assistance people who are interested in helping out with art (Screengrabbed or new pixelart would be cool,) making the race-mod cards, and people to help out with balance testing, but that should be it.

I'm definitely intrigued by this project, enough so to at least want to take a look at the rules, if you have them in some convenient text format.  I'd also be willing to lend a hand with art.  I'm no master of digital artwork, mind you, but I have a long history of fiddling with board game ideas and trying to make game tokens for them.

I've already taken the liberty of downloading the 2D art from the link Luki provided.  I don't really have a lot of skill at drawing my own art, but I can photoshop existing art pretty well, I think.  As long as this remains a non-profit venture I don't think TFB would have an issue with it, based on their past statements regarding fan work.  Once I have a feel for the kinds of game components needed, I'll draw up a few examples and you can decide if you want me to do more or not.

I'm with the others that cover art isn't part of continuity.  I've lost count of the number of game boxes whose art didn't entirely match the game's continuity, especially from the 80s and early 90s.  Take the classic SC2 box art, for example (the one with the human and the weird brown alien.)  What is that thing?  Illwrath?  Ur-Quan?  It doesn't look precisely like any of the races encountered in the game.  I get the impression it's supposed to be an Ur-Quan, but it looks more like Jabba the Hutt to me than anything in SC2.  In fairness, it may have been drawn before the game art was finalized during production.

Bottom line, box art and splash screens are not bound to the continuity of the universe.  The Melee game allows you to play as Chenjesu, so that's probably where the art came from.

Hitchhiker's was originally a radio play in 1978 (thanks, Google!) and the books were published between '79 and '92.  So yeah, there could've been hitchhiker references in SC2, although I don't remember any off the top of my head.

I don't have any device. I thought I'll go out to kill some ships and earn my living so I rely on this one Spathi ship I have.
I want a little too far from home and now I don't have enough fire power to kill all those ships around me.

In my experience, the best way to get cash at the start of the game is to go mining planets near Earth, not pick fights with anyone (especially not the Ur-Quan!)
Short of cheating, I think you're screwed, as you say.

I'd never really thought of the SC universe as being very close to any other Sci-Fi, and that's one of the things I liked about it.  I admit, having read this thread, that there are some startling parallels between it and B5, many of which never dawned on me before, so I guess I'd have to go with that answer.  There are some tongue-in-cheek resemblances to other sci-fi shows, such as the design of Earth cruisers, but that sort of satirical similarity doesn't really count IMHO.

Farscape does get a nod for trying to avoid the "human with plastic foreheads" syndrome, in my opinion.  They didn't succeed as well as some might have liked, but they certainly tried harder than any other Sci-Fi TV show that I can think of.  I'm surprised, even in this age of CGI prolifery, that this syndrome is still so pervasive.  I suppose directors and writers still fall prey to the fickle masses who are unwilling to think outside the box on that note (alternatively, the fickle male masses who want to see green boobs more than they want to see a realistic depiction of alien evolution.)

The idea of a precursor race who seeded life in our galaxy (or at least left behind some awesome ruins) is actually not as uncommon as one might think.  Star Trek did it in one TNG episode (The Chase, I think?) B5, Stargate, Homeworld, StarCraft, Mass Effect and many others have used that basic idea as well.  All the examples I can think of come after StarCon 2, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are as many examples from sci-fi sources that predate it.

I think the main reason the Kzer-Za didn't exterminate the Syreen is, as others have said, because of their morality.  The Kzer-Za decided to give other races a choice - be slave shielded or become battle thralls.  They decided to offer this choice because they could not condone the Kohr-Ah doctrine of unilateral extermination.  They do have a code of ethics, however harsh it might seem to us.  That fact that each race in the StarCon universe has a complex rationale for their behaviour is one of the things that makes this game such an undying classic in my mind.  It's not just good and evil, black and white.  And sometimes the logic is very alien-minded, not the sort of thing a human being would come up with, but it's always there.

If the Kzer-Za exterminated the Syreen, they would be no better than the Kohr-Ah.  They've already shown they're willing to enslave the Dnyarri instead of killing them - if they can show that much restraint with the very race that held them in thrall for so many years then letting the Syreen survive under a slave shield is small potatoes.

They obviously aren't concerned about the question of future evolution of the Syreen, nor are they concerned about the future evolution of the Dnyarri.  Maybe this is borne of an overconfidence in their technology, maybe it's borne of a moral high ground attitude ("perhaps they will evolve, but the potential for future threat does not excuse killing them in the present.  The ends do not justify the means.")  Maybe the Kzer-Za are just generally too short-sighted to foresee that outcome (highly unlikely, imho.)  Whatever the reason for their mercy, the fact stands that they are obviously not willing to exterminate races simply for displaying psychic compulsion abilities, despite their past.  The fact that the Dnyarri still survive - in whatever limited form - is the most potent evidence of that fact, I think.  Does this compassion leave room for future problems?  Yes, it probably does.  In my mind that just goes to show that not even the mighty Kzer-Za are infallible.  It's easy to sit back and nit-pick story elements as a player, but in the real world people do make mistakes, based on pity or compassion among other things.  I don't see it as a plot hole that the Kzer-Za are equally capable of making such mistakes.  I would be more disappointed in the game if the villains were completely infallible, remorselessly evil scoundrels who anticipated every possible error and corrected for it.  That universe would seem much less real to me than the one that has been created here, and that would certainly influence my desire to continue thinking about this game nearly two decades after it was first released.

As for the question of what happens when they move on to a new sector of space - what new sector of space?  The Kzer-Za left their home region going one way around the galaxy, the Kohr-Ah went the other way.  They met again in our sector of space.  That means everything in our galaxy has been covered by one race or the other by the time this game begins.  Even if the fleets are moving at different speeds and thus this sector of space is not exactly opposite their home space, they've still covered the whole galaxy between the two of them by the time they come together again.

If the Kzer-Za had come out on top in the conflict, they might have sent a few scouts to make sure the Kohr-Ah didn't miss any races in their path around the galaxy, but they can reasonably expect to find little if anything left alive in the area the Kohr-Ah moved through.  And everything in the area the Kzer-Za covered is now enslaved, one way or the other, so they're done.  They would just need to set about occupying whatever remains of the galaxy, including our sector of space, so they wouldn't be turning their backs on any potential threat from the Syreen.  If anything they'd be bunkering down and watching them closer after the Kohr-Ah were dealt with, if the Syreen were really that much of a concern to them.