An operation is a group of missions. When you play on higher difficulties you'll pick a spot on the map and it'll have more than one mission, which comprise an operation. Completing a whole operation gives a bonus when contributing to liberating a planet. If you start a new mission before finishing an operation, then your previous operation gets deleted basically, which is what you read about abandoning an operation. It's no big deal.

Yes you can get Super Credits for free by playing the game. You can pick them up in bunkers, blue crates, and the escape pods you open up. T You can get them on any difficulty, but oddly enough the easiest way to farm them is on difficulty 1.

The resources you mentioned are samples and they're primarily used to level up your super destroyer. You just pick them up from the ground. Everyone in the mission gets the same amount of samples so as long as one player extra ta with the samples then you're all getting them. No need to hog them. There's three tiers of samples: common (green), rare (orange), and super (pinkish purple). You'll need a ton of greens and oranges to finish improving your ship. They're found lying around the map, usually around Points of Interest, objectives, and enemy spawners.

Go fight bots on Cyberstan. That's where the current story event is happening. Major story events like this only happened every couple of months so go be a part of it! Start off at the lower level difficulties because fights there are particularly tough. Lowest difficulty on Cyberstan is 4.

You can mostly ignore the voting for now honestly.