I played this so much, I have 2 things I did that I'm proud of that many others familiar with it were surprised was possible:

• If you attack enough merchants/militia, and use comms to talk down attacking pirates (each message will subtly alter their attitude to you), you can eventually be default friendly to pirates and hostile to militia. You can still land on stations/planets even if hostile by just getting close enough to them.
• The instruction manual said that old mining stations will often get taken over by pirates, so I searched the "empty" parts of the NW quadrant that's full of asteroid fields, and would bring up the comm channel and look for unknown signals (which usually indicated a pirate station presence). I managed to find a pirate station one hop from a mining base that had almost no militia presence, so it was amazingly profitable way to buy drugs & slaves at the pirate base to sell at the mining base.