Warfare & Tactics

The key to success in Solo / Smallscale is Velocity. You have to create a difference in your and your opponents velocity as big in your favor as you can get.

Even with very good target selection (which is also very important), if you're a brawler and hard tackled it's your DPS against his and / or his backup's ETA.

To close that D-Scan failure where you can't see them before you drop on them:
Make a bounce. Go to a nearby celestial first, get that d-scan going, and then decide to fight or not. (Or to 'fun' or 'run'.)
Never warp blindly into a fight.

Step 2: Know your enemy.
Your main tool of intelligence will be their killboard.
More often than not you're going to be able to say which player you will be going up against.
Go to zKillboard, enter their name, check for losses in their current ship and look for it's usual fitting. You will be able to make astonishing predictions on how the fight will be going, which allows you to do some out-of-the-box things, if you feel comfortable to do so.
Step2.1: If you don't know who's that guy on d-scan, try to get him on grid without immediately engaging. In a FW plex, this might be burnung out to ~50km, wait for him to appear on grid, remember name, and warp safe. After a minute, you checked his KB and can tell whether to fun or run.


Super-Advanced Stuff:

When you are about to engage someone and know who it is, send him a fleet invite.
2 Scenarios:
1 - You get a notification that he already is in Fleet and is unable to join yours. Your Alarm Sirens should be shrieking now in some flashy red.
2 - The invite goes through, and you just gave him about 3 seconds where he's confused as ****. You can immediately drop fleet so he can't be in the same as you - or you'll let it go through and maybe he's really, really stupid. Just keep in mind, if he accepts, and you have to run, drop fleet!



Edit:

Wow, didn't know this PLH even existed. Gotta look into this.