Well, you know how sometimes beacons that look close aren't actually connected?
Yeah.
So I was cutting a nice path, thought I'd just nip over to see what's in the bottom right corner, then a couple jump up to the exit and...
Yeah, there's a big gap of no-man's-land.
Suddenly, instead of 2 jumps from the exit as I had thought, I am 5 jumps away. Naturally, every single one of those jumps is through fleet territory.
Yeah.
At that point, I'd put a point into weapons so I could use all of my starting weapons, a point into engines, and one reactor upgrade. (So I had everything powered except one slot in engine, which I often do - whenever they fire I switch power from oxygen to power the engines, then after they hit/miss I switch it back).
That's all the upgrades.
Five fleet battles, on Normal.
First battle, they took out my engines (and started a fire, the bastards) and medibay. Started a couple more fires, of course. Had to scramble to repair everything and get out, lost like 40% of my hull.
Next two went better, but in each I was trying to fix up the damage from the previous battles as I was fighting. Used a LOT of missiles from my breach bomb; this was not the time to conserve ammo.
Fourth battle went really well, and I was even able to laser the crew - I got the Disintegration Ray achievement in here. Was able to kill the crew, giving me time to repair all my systems and heal up all of my characters.
Next beacon was the exit beacon.
Took a deep breath and crossed my fingers, went over the battle plan. Breach bomb into the shield room, followed by dual lasers into the weapon room ; second round, breach bomb and dual lasers into the weapon room followed by anti-bio against as many crew as possible.
I clicked to jump on the exit beacon. With a little luck, I could...
Yeah.
Halberd Beam, and me with 1 shield.
gg.
something is missing on that ship. 
Something very dear to a pirate like me.