All's fair...

If you head back Wahlstatt to lick your wounds after the ZR2 battle, you have to do the ZR2 battle all over again. Then you head on toward the Taurus base, where you will be wiped out.

The first Taurus battle is so-so, no trouble if you stay on your toes about depleting HP. The second one looks like the first, but the second ship in line is a ringer. That's the one that gets you. Ugh.

I have a fairly high tolerance for levelling up, which is both repetitive and sort of meditative, so I've been heading back to the restricted airspace (spacespace?) of realms that used to be wide open weeks ago, and grinding up Junkyards, Sodalities, Fellowships, and so on... The shock comes hours later when you head bad to Mensa, the staging planet for the assault on ZR2, realize too late that you've overlooked the tiny hidden back-door starlane discovered by the Bad-to-the-Bone pirates (and Kira, at the appropriate moment), that gets you back to Mensa, which isn't there...! You overshot your destination! Which is when the ZR2 gang use you for target practice. Again.

Hours of grinding, back to rust in nothing flat. The nice thing is, I thought the game had glitched and forgotten the way back, but no, you can take your time, level up, and whack the wumpus when you get around to it... (It's a game.)