A couple more comments.
1. What happens if it crashes while doing this?
2. How are you going to know if someone cut out saving the game; easy to do if you know how.
The True Viking Challenge (Defunct)
CrazyBirdie if it crashes that would suck... But there shouldn't be any crashes if there, and its related to my mod, let me know so I can fix it.
There are a lot of ways to tell if the video has been cut or edited one being the credits and ftl fuel amounts, frame skips, and the AI behaviors (in case they think they are clever and change difficulties)
But to answer your question there is no perfect solution to stop cheating but I am trying to make it as hard as possible to cheat.
As a side note anyone good enough to beat this isn't going to risk the run by attempting to cheat the amount of effort required to cheat this isn't worth the reward IMO which is why it's only a $20 bounty and not a $50 one like I wanted to do.
Northerner Alright. I used to have Cosmoteer crash a lot, but that was due to outdated video drivers. Once I updated them, it has worked fine for the most part.
One other thing, for if I can manage to try this. I usually alt-tab away during things like FTL jumps; would I need to keep the Cosmoteer screen up the entire time?
CrazyBirdie Your game does not auto pause when you alt-tab out? Anyway I would have decide on a case by case basis since I am sure you wouldn't be the only one to do that. But for simplicities sake I would just keep Cosmoteer open.
XCOM has an Ironman mode, man. And it will hurt you 10X more than the XCOM where you can save somebody from death 
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dafeeeeeeeeeesh IDK about you but the era of gaming I'm from that's how iron man challenges worked. The most recent examples i can think of are Halo 3s Marathon mode and Dead Space 2 nightmare mode. Though those are so easier than the really old school ones I'm trying to emulate.
Good news everyone! I have found out that this challenge is actually possible to complete! I haven't quite done it yet but in getting close to a winning strategy
Northerner I am going to stream a run of this in 2 hours!
You can watch it here.
5 days later
Since it seems there is a lack of interest in the challenge two things have happened
1 some rules have been altered
2 the bounty has been increased
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Northerner Thank you very much. I will attempt it now.
By the way, the former bounty was sufficient for me, but the rules made it difficult for me to try.
Northerner There are several ways to do it but I recommend nVidia Shadow Play personally.
I tried installing ShadowPlay, but I got an error saying that my system doesn't support the package (I have Windows 7). Any other suggestions?
CrazyBirdie Try that again since it works for me and I have windows 7 as well. If it still does not work I think YouTube has some capture software you can use
Northerner I'm gonna be direct:
Northerner To complete Galaxy in Flames you must beat the ship called "The Alexander" only then will the run be complete.
The Alexander is pretty damn weak compared to its size. Any better kite could turn it to swiss cheese.
It's almost impossible to get that far tho.
And I don't think anyone here does the challenge for the bounty. I certainly don't.
I imagine the first few zones are the hardest and if handled well enough the player can snowball from there.
CursedPh4nt0m In my opinion, The Alexander is strong. If you are comparing it to a rail ship of that size then no it is weak. But what is stronger than rail guns over 200k anyway?
The problem with most players is they don't seem to understand the situation they will be put in the final fight, it has a large escort of ships, and a large amount of missiles. Kiting will be a risky strategy and this challenge punishes risk harshly. Regardless I agree it is hard to get to the fight in the first place.
I don't think most are doing this for the bounty either but I also don't want this challenge to just die like others that have been suggested. And it is a lot of work to try to pull off so I think $50 is worth the effort more than $20.
Northerner I personally think beating this challenge and proving ones skill is the biggest reward one should strive for. And the ai usually is fricking stupid, so it's not too hard to get rid of said escort. (The standart lurk-the-fastest-ship(s)-away/have-the-enemy-fleet-split-up procedere, you most likely know the drill.) The missiles shouldn't be any problem for Flak-defenses, they usually fly at different targets anyway.
One last question: Does the "no mods"-rule include speedset? My toaster almost gets fried by 5 million ship fights and the 1/10 speed setting is the only way I know of to keep my game from crashing during any bigger fights. Would have to somehow get my hands on an actual computer otherwise.
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CursedPh4nt0m if you can prove that is the only mod you are using and it does not alter any of the parts, then I would be okay with it
ShadowPlay still refuses to install, so I am using OBS Studio (open source screen capture) instead. However, when I tested it on a less-CPU-intensive game than Cosmoteer, the game started glitching and jumping a bit (which it usually doesn't do). I have a test video that shows it, and it mostly appears with numbers of moving sprites. I'm not sure why the screen is black at first, though, but it isn't of much consequence.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/hdsz9pq1i7ux7a0/Aground_Test_Capture.mov/file
CrazyBirdie well you could use fraps that's what most early youtubers use. But I don't know anything about it