Maybe I should read the manual

I made the grave mistake of signing up to kill a pirate in the midst of heavy cargo hauling. I had 80 tons of cargo and was in the midst of making hops to get it to the destination when I hopped into the target location for the pirate. Ignoring the "mission objective found" I was dawdling around the sun when he ambushes me and while he was supposed to be harmless he did much harm. He attacked at the subsystem level and took out my thrusters and FSD. That is some serious Star Trek crap. Luckily this was a high security system and two enforcers chased him off but I was left spinning uncontrollably. Realizing that no one was going to come and that I couldn't really do anything in a ship without thrusters, I decided to go to the ship menu and self destruct ($1M CR to rebuild). Reading is fundamental so I noticed a repair option on the menu far above the self destruct option. The repair gave me 1% health on my thrusters which was enough to limp into a station with a shop. Phew I almost committed Sepuku for nothing!