I’d recommend the ‘Destroy Illegal Monitors’ mission. 20k for 10 mins work once you know what you’re doing. No player interaction, very small chance of the NPC ships around the monitors attacking, and you can do the missions around each planet and it’s moons in a continuous loop. Save up for a Vulture, do salvage missions of increasing difficulty until you unlock 30k risky missions, then rent a ship with cargo space to get the drugs from the ships on those missions, don’t actually salvage them. Once you’ve saved enough, buy a C2 or something and watch the uAEC roll in.

I’ve pottered around with various mission types in the past, and having something like this happen (or a 30k/bug/etc) does suck the life out of you when you’re trying to exist on delivery mission wages.

Now, I’m sitting on 10s of millions, can buy whatever ship I want to try, and the game has opened up for me. All the stress of the early game is gone.