"Constrictor Hunt", bug or reward?

[L0CI]

I've just finished the Constrictor Hunt mission (well I assume I have - I finished the ship at least!) and my kills have jumped by over 200

I begin on 430 kills and at Competent rank. Jumped into the system and the Constrictor was on me right away. Fought with it for a while and everything was going according to plan, until a herd of Vipers showed up; Navy or GalCop, I'm not sure. Anyway I must have clipped one of them with some stray laser fire as the scanner lit up like a Chirstmas tree and I was suddenly being hammered from all angles. With no missiles, energy bomb and bits rapidly falling off my ship including the witch drive injectors (grrrr) the only option I had left was to F6-H it out of there pronto. Which I did.

Now, this was bound to happen at some point but... why now????

....... Witchdrive failure

So there I am, slap bang in the middle of total chaos; more ships than I've ever seen... thankfully all of which are currently ignoring me. I limped away as quietly as I could and let my shields & energy replen. The Navy mopped up 99% of them but I did manage to down a couple of Terrorizer Frigates, Warships and maybe 20 Robot Fighters floating harmlessly about having lost their parent craft. That done with, I hopped back through a wormhole and refuelled at the system station.

Back to the Constrictor then! Jumped back into the system and, after a very short search, found it (on its own this time) and blew it away. Most satisfying it was too after all I'd just been through

The point of this post? I am now "Dangerous" with 682 kills... Fair enough I got a few Thargoid kills, but 251? Not even close. Not even 51.
Is there some odd reward in kills for completing the mission, or has my game gone a bit strange?

[Cody]

Hi L0CI... you get 256 kills for splashing the Constrictor, so all is well.

[L0CI]

So we've established that a.) I haven't acidentally cheated or been cheated - good to know! and b.) I can't count

Thanks for the reply, I can get back to blowing things up and not looking at my back up save thinking "should I?"

[Commander McLane]

The Constrictor mission is designed to make you dangerous, so you're prepared to follow up with another mission for the Navy some time later. Therefore it awards you 256 kills. By the way, this is a legacy inherited from Elite, where you also got 256 kills.

As for the rest of your story: that's certainly worth an Oolite Darwin Award. (And you survived! )

[L0CI]

Nice, I enjoyed reading those. Added my latest and most memorable umm... miscalculations