I was playing Nightmare, the final scenario of the TA campaign.  (Incidently, this is the only campaign I have completed, and had the following outcome:

SPOILER WARNING

Very early in the game, I contacted the Krynn (of course, they are close neighbors) and went to talk to them.  Looking through the techs, they had available, I noticed that they had all 5 terror star techs, and they sold them to me!

I was able to build a terror star and win before my initial money ran out (at a burn rate of over 500bc per turn), and before the Dread Lords build anything more fearsome than 1 attack 5 move small hulled ships.

Has anyone else seen this?  Frankly I was expecting a long slog while under heavy attack from invincible DL ships, so it seemed a bit disappointing that I could circumvent the scenario so easily.  (Yes, I realize that I could have just not asked for those techs and gone the long route, but I wanted to finish.)