Congrats on the Vette, Sevin Church!
Skipp wrote:And yea - I guess once you get your rep up you might get better missions but that only means more bar-grinds.
You can build rep pretty fast just doing little missions from Sothis to Ceos and back. I did two runs to the bubble the first weekend, hauling what I they'd let me have, and bringing back a lot of commodities for 'fetch' missions. I hit friendly after just those two runs.... about 5-6 hours.
Once I hit friendly with the locals, I was pulling in $75mil per run in the Cutter pretty consistently ($50mil per run in the Conda the previous weekend) with 6-7 stops in the bubble.
It's a tougher road to hoe in a smaller ship, but if a guy can carry some good tonnage (or sit longer to cycle the boards for lower quantity missions) it's a money making machine.
I did 4 runs over the weekend, made $300,776,000 and gained 48% on trade rank to hit Elite. Each run took me about 2.5-3 hours, depending on interruptions from reading the message board, FB, and being chatty on Discord.
Well worth the effort to get your rep up and make lots and lots and lots of jumps to make tons and tons and tons of money, IMO.
And... bring a discovery scanner. When you tire of Sothis runs, take all of that data to your favorite engineer for bonus money and rep with them too.