So, more progress is being made on my space shooter game.  Thanks to a very funny bug that resulted in a ship being spawned every time an enemy hits the player ship while the player ship is invincible, I now have a really fun idea for a powerup:

This powerup will cause maybe 20 ghost ships to appear out of your one ship and collectively allow you to destroy every enemy on screen with a powerful barrage of thousands of bullets!

And yes, there are less than 0 lives remaining in the screenshot.