Funny story:
I once encountered an automated scout by a Class M star. I damaged it to a certain point and the ship decided it wanted to escape and the best way to do that was to head straight towards a nearby star...
So essentially nothing had actually happened when I chased after it, but still...
It certainly beats the one where it decides to flee to an asteroid belt after I smash the shields and helm. So the first rock destroys the fool
-------------------
As for the ion storm power thing (since it's the main topic), the only real thing I know about power bars is that if you have more than the limit and you activate something that takes even a single bar of power away, then the game crashes. Or if you use a high-level battery.
Because there's a solution to avoid ion storms - don't go to them. But you can't avoid those flavour texts that drain your reactor and it sort of limits the augments you can use as it takes power away.
EDIT:
Bug report:
I encountered a beacon where there was nothing but darkness (not the automated ship factory, the other beacon you normally get in automated sectors)... being curious, I had a look inside and found some scrap down a shaft. Then an automated cruiser attacked me.
Since I had two augments, my only choices were "Activate Teleport Scrambler" and "Activate Subspace Scanner Cloakbuster"
The ship had neither, so using either one would be a waste of power. But the problem was that I couldn't just choose "Fight the ship" I had to waste a bar of power to get into the fight.
EDIT 2:
Encountered this at the entrance beacon in the infinite depths of space
However the pilot seems to be stuck in his room, unable to get out from there.
EDIT 3:
Just blew that ship up. Gibs seem to be off to the left side, and when it exploded, several big gibs vanished.