I've never been super serious about combat, focusing on trading and exploration, and just enough combat to get elite. I've barely done any combat since before the Distant Worlds Expedition a year and a half ago. I cleared my save and moved to Colonia 6 months ago, and have barely scratched my combat rank since, doing mostly mining and missions. Then I took a couple months off.
So after a few evenings back, today I figured I'd give combat a go. I bought my first ever FDL (Colonia outfitting). I interdicted a few pirates and took an assassination mission. Thinking this was pretty easy, I headed to the High Res. First thing I took on was a wing and got out of that with 75% hull, thanks to the help from the local defense forces. But instead of leaving, I stuck around. Made a couple million before I took on a deadly FGS. I got his shields down fast enough, but he must have been hull tanked or something. I eventually lost my shields. Instead of bugging out, I stayed in the fight. Several warnings about the cockpit later I was still slugging it out. Then the canopy blew.
I finally ran for it then, but it took me two minutes to figure out that I'd never make it to Pendersen's Legacy, and then took another 30 seconds to figure out I could jump to another system faster, but had to log out to figure out where to go because I forgot where everything was. So I logged back in and headed to Morty's with about 2 minutes of air left. I ran out of time about 5 seconds from being able to drop out of SC at the outpost.
I would have made it easily if I jumped right away, or if I had better life support for being out in the boonies, or if I wasn't so stupid about staying in a fight. Oh well, this would have really bugged me 2 years ago. Now it's just - meh, it's only credits, which are stupid easy to make. If they forced an iron man mode I may feel a bit differently, and I'd certainly play differently.
I also forgot I wasn't going to try combat again until I got my CH Throttle/USB troubles figured out.