Every time i take it out of the hanger to go and hunt. The out come is crap.
The Fer-de-Lance is an absolutely amazing combat ship right now. I'm assuming here that you have an A-spec, fully Engineered ship. If not, then do that before you fight again because otherwise you are needlessly limiting yourself.
The FDL does have issues with heat, especially if you run a hot build, but it also has plenty of spare power and utility slots. The first (and most obvious) answer to the heat issue is to put the best low emissions power plant mod you can roll without affecting power management. I have a grade 2 low emissions mod on my FDL which gives it a thermal efficiency of around 0.3. You can also bring one or two heat sinks for the occasional times when you still manage to overheat (i.e., full weapons fire, boosting and SCB use simultaneously).
If your build uses weapons that are particularly high heat output, such as incendiary multicannons or beams, then you will need some additional management around those builds. I use 4 X medium overcharged incendiary multis on my FDL and so I specifically looked for multis I rolled that happened to get secondaries that improved thermal load. I moved any of these from other ships to my FDL so that I could get a full set of four overcharged incendiary multis that each have thermal load of around 0.4, i.e., around double thermal load instead of triple. This helps quite bit to make the thermal load manageable. For beams you would obviously want a grade 5 efficient mod on them to achieve a similar result.
Once you deal with the heat issues (which can easily be done with the appropriate Engineering mods) the FDL is an absolutely amazing ship. Heavy firepower, amazing shields, great speed and good handling (at least if you keep the throttle in the blue zone).
For comparison, I've recently been doing some CZ combat in my Python and I've found the FDL is FAR more effective at sustained combat then my Python. The overall firepower is similar but the FDL can catch smaller fighters and close to an effective combat range much easier meaning the dps output from the FDL is effectively quite a bit better then the Python. The FDL's speed and handling also make it much more survivable against sustained fire and you can carry plenty of shield boosters/PD/chaff with the FDL's 6 utility slots.
There is really no reason you should be struggling with an FDL, unless you are flying a ship that isn't A-rated and Engineered or if you haven't dealt with the heat management issues.
