About to set off for Maia

Newbie here...I'm ready to go to Maia and grab some meta-allows for Felicity and on the way (sort of) will drop by Wolf 387 to give up my 100k in bounties to Tod. Anything I should do before heading out all that way? It's a long trip and hope not to hear "you should have brought 'x' along to make profits" or something like that...

Got a diamondback explorer kitted out with SRV, explo rig of course. 8M in the bank.
 
If that's not already the plan, don't buy your Meta Alloy, but get it from a Barnacle site. It's more exciting and profitable. You could also check out one of the Thargoid bases where you can find even more Meta Alloy and an even more exciting surrounding. You'll need an SRV though.
On both sites there are spikes with targettable "thingies" on top. The big ones are Meta Alloys even it doesn't say it until you collect it. Some Barnacle sites don't have any, so don't wonder if you are unlucky.

Fly safe. o7
 
Barnacles are awesome and Thargoid sites are creepy.
With some MAs in your hold you should get some pirates and a Thargoid Hyperdiction.
 
Don't get too ambitious.

Just get the meta-alloy and get it back to Auntie Felicity.

Once you've done that, you can engineer your FSD and then trips to places like Maia stop being a hassle.

There are a couple of interesting places near Maia (Dav's Hope and the Jameson crash site) but, really, just get the MA to Farseer and then go visit them.
With an upgraded FSD, it's only 4 or 5 jumps. (y)
 
You also need to travel 5k ly from your original starting starting system for another engineer. As someone else has said, get yourself a dbx kitted out for jump range if you haven't already got one. It's a ship that I still regularly use now, so it's a good investment I did my 5k using the neutron highway but it did cost me a couple of rebuys practicing scooping at Jackson's Lighthouse in a sidewinder.
 
You also need to travel 5k ly from your original starting starting system. As someone else has said, get yourself a dbx kitted out for jump range if you haven't already got one. It's a ship that I still regularly use now, so it's a good investment I did my 5k using the neutron highway but it did cost me a couple of rebuys practicing scooping at Jackson's Lighthouse in a sidewinder.
That's a couple of engineer unlocks down the road. OP will want to do that at some point IMO, since g5 dirty drives are pretty much standard for all of my ships now. Felicity offers g3 thruster upgrades, which is still a useful performance boost.

All 3 thruster tinkering engineers offer the enhanced thrusters (up to class 3) as well, so there's no huge rush to go after Palin yet.
 
Sound advice from everyone, to which I'd add "pack some shields". Meta alloys are valuable, and NPCs like valuable cargo. You're quite likely to be jumped on the way to Aunty Fel's.

That's the thing.

I mean, I suppose you could, for example, go and buy a few rare goods and cart them out to Maia to make some credits but all you're doing is painting a big bullseye on the side of your ship.

Ultimately, it might be worth visiting Dav's Hope and the Jameson site on the way to pick up an MA, just to gather a little stockpile of mat's, but if you get exploded on the way it means making the trip all over again.

Speaking as somebody who's been to places like SagA and Beagle Point, I had to make the trip to Maia recently to unlock FF for my alt-account and it is quite a trek in an unengineered ship so it's better to just avoid trouble.
 
Speaking as somebody who's been to places like SagA and Beagle Point, I had to make the trip to Maia recently to unlock FF for my alt-account and it is quite a trek in an unengineered ship so it's better to just avoid trouble.
I still remember the Dove Enigma. I jonked out to Maia in my exploration-outfitted AspX. It has light shields, but they're mostly of the "don't scratch my paint" variety. I loaded up, and by the time I was past Palee (pretty much the last system I encounter on my way out of the Bubble towards Colonia) my hull was at about 60%.

So, yes...expect at least some trouble on the trip :)
 
As @Stealthie said, focus on the tasks in hand. You have bounties to hand in that you'll lose if someone clobbers you. Guess you have already A-rated your FSD in preparation? Think about what experimental you may want on your FSD beforehand as you can only add that at Farseer's base so you'll need the materials up front.
 
This is probably a bit too much for a truly new player, but here's what I did last time I started a new commander (just a couple weeks ago)

I did a quick check of valuable systems along the route (using this tool to make a route for myself http://edtools.ddns.net/expl.php ), and made sure I stopped at each one and scanned the water worlds and earth-like worlds and etc. It took me a few hours to get to Maia that way, but when I arrived I had about 5 million in exploration data, which I sold to Felicity when I got there with my meta-alloy. I did this in a mostly stock Viper MKIV, so you don't need much ship. That raised her to grade 4.5 access, saving me a bunch of time (and making me some money too).
 
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