It is fun and intense isnt it - most newer players tend to loathe it with a passion, but I like you loved it. At level 4 its even more fun 
Nearly lost my Merlin class frigate (which I took from corp hangar, as the Level 1 version can't be completed with anything else but a frigate) when I warped in first time. Hoooly crap, there were *many* blips, and *two* gates. Looking at all the blips on the screeen I felt my pants get wet. I read the mission briefing again, and noticed I don't have to kill all the stuff but can just warp through the gate, so I picked one of the gates and did head for it (after I had asked for advice on our channel and was told it doesn't prolly matter which gate I choose). Scrambled to the first gate through hellish fire (the pirates had had time to get uncomfortably close while I was hesitating), only to notice there are even more blips in the second pocket. Hesitating again for a moment, and armour began to take hits, warped the hell out to some random station (first one I hit in the list). After repairs, went back in, this time going as fast as I could for the first gate, destroyed a hostile ship in second pocket and warped out as I again was taking hits on the armour. After that I tried a new tactics, and it worked like a charm, it just took a looong time and there were some points were my shield got below 50%. I'll not tell the tactics if somebody wants to figure it out for themselves (it was for me the most fun part, trying to figure out how the heck can the mission be completed
), but I am happy to give advice if somebody wants that
. Afterwards went back in to loot and salvage, and my guesstimate is that the loot&salvage is worth 4-5 millions (plus the bounties on killed pirates were worth over a million) so quite profitable!
