we were just coming down from hyper when the sensors pinged an incoming hyper track inbound I shouted "battle stations we've got incoming" shields were raised immediately and not a second too soon as a frigate dropped out of hyper off our aft and immediately started launching missiles not just one or two but they had launched ten over kill on most ships let alone a old frigate but I quickly recovered my shock and ordered the long range defensive action be taken essentially we fired a ton of proximity fused 20mm at the missiles focusing down a missile per turret luckily we were able to take out six at extreme range and even scuff the paint on the enemy frigate a bit.
Six out of fifteen left nine more missiles inbound and in my panic I'd pushed the drives to maximum which gave us a little bit of a start drawing out the engagement time we had with the missiles but even with it we still had 9 reach extreme point defense laser range and they cleaned up another five before they got into point-blank range luckily we had raised shields but it still wasn't enough to stop what was coming luckily we got two more missiles before they could detonate the last two impacted with the shields and hull respectively luckily we were tough. The first missile took out the shields the second impacted amidships exterior of cargo hold 3 and burnt off some armor but we were intact so I ordered us to swing around and hit them with the railgun but they were already running the other direction with no chance of us catching them with the built up velocity we had but I wasn't going to let them get off free so I ordered a full volley of railgun shots in a spread pattern at 3/4 power so we could get an extra shot in and a full second of 20mm cannon fire to mess with their radar
I wasn't expecting much from my Salvo of five shots and a full second of 20mm but then when they were nearly out of sensor range they started gyrating trying to dodge the projectiles we had latched and we were treated to the scene of sparks flying from their flank as one of the shells struck a glancing hit and then a few seconds later the volley of 20mm fire I'd ordered started peppering them and we held our breath as sparks flew as hot chaff in space honestly we could only really see the thermal blooms from the impacts our sensors wouldn't have normally picked them up at this range but we had them focused in on them and so were were surprised when just as the 20mm shells were done a series of explosions ripped through the enemies ship.
By the time we arrived where the enemy ship had been little more than an expanding cloud of debris remained and even that we checked for salvage. After doing a preliminary salvage assessment we determined that it just wasn't worth it and moved on going back into hyper space once the drive was cooled off. two weeks passed with nothing happening out of the ordinary we ran a few small trade missions where security was more important than speed and we still beat their expectations even upgraded the drive coils and managed to get into the gamma hyper band but we would lose drive efficiency and burn through twice the fuel at that speed still having the option was nice.
After getting the damage assessment I realized that we would need to fix the hull as despite the fact it stopped a missile dead it had also been seriously damaged in a small area and would be about half as effective until replaced it could have been worse which I was grateful it wasn't. To fix the armor there were two options buy or find another old corvette like this one or reverse engineer the material and make our own and despite how ingenious my crew had turned out to be I doubted they would be up to the task. Finding HHM ship armor is pretty difficult as most were salvaged for trace elements and would be hard to find.
Hunting for spare armor parts for my ship proved to be an experience and we finally managed to get a set of assorted parts for replacement sadly they were not the exact part we needed but luckily there was a piece we could modify to replace the armor panels that had been compromised. After replacing damaged panels I took stock of our situation 5 experienced crew counting myself 2 trainees a nearly full load of fuel full loads of 100mm cannon and 20mm gun ammo 60 railgun rounds 12 operational point defense laser turrets meaning all of them and one 12cm hellbore laser cannon fully functional we were finally ready for anything or so I thought.
One month later
We were coming out of hyper when we detected 8 ships sitting off our bow and they were ready for combat luckily I had standing orders to immediately go full defensive when coming out of hyper.