I remember frequenting HotUD back in the day and Parkan came up a few times but I want to say it was pretty universally panned.

Exceeeeeeept I think maybe that was the sequel everyone as talking about, and not this.

Or am I thinking of some other Parkan-like space game altogether?

There are 3 Parkan games, this one (1997), the Parkan Iron Strategy (2001), and finally Parkan 2 (2005).

I played Parkan 2 first, back in 2008.... I loved it but there is some kind of memory leak or bug that makes certain parts of the game run slower and slower as you progress until it is unbearable. So obviously I never finished the game, I tried again last year and ran into the same issue. Not sure if the GOG version is fixed or not but that would be great.

The Imperial Chronicles is a more DooM like version of Parkan 2, and I really like it but I have a hard time playing games from that era these days.