Edited in: Short answer, you don't need missions to do stuff
Best advice I can give you if you've just started.
Go to Kremainn system, should be 1-2 hops away.
Find the Wohler Terminal station. If you cannot see it on your navigation panel instead target the "nav beacon". Once there and in normal space with other ships around you find the white dot and target it. Scan it until you get the message and the station should now be visible to you.
Go to the station, dock and refuel for safety. Ensure your sidewinder has the 2 pulse lasers you started with and they are mapped to the fire keys.
Undock and get out the station then find a Resource Extraction site. There should be several nearby. You are looking for either High, Low or no flair. If it says Haz/Hazardous avoid it.
Get to there and you'll see miners, pirates and police ships (usually named security services etc). Follow the largest group of police around, or scan for laser fire in the distance. When there's a battle between the police and pirates stay close but not too close (~2km out is a good shout) and target the pirate, ensure you get the information bottom left like "wanted, faction, hull and shield strength etc"
Then when the police knock them down to around 5% hull health swoop in and open fire. Despite doing little work you'll claim all the bounty on that pirate. For the bigger ships it can be anything from 40,000Cr to 80,000Cr per ship.
When you get 2-3 kills get out of there, go back to the station and cash in. Buy an Eagle and fit it with a kill warrant scanner. Then do the same again but this time whilst the police are in battle use the KWS to scan for hidden bounties on the pirate before you take them out (much higher profits). It's a press and hold type deal. Note higher grade KWS take tons of power with the only real benefit being longer scanning range, ensure your ship doesn't shut down when you deploy hardpoints. You probably want C/D/E grade.
That'll see you good into a few hundred thousand credits and the ability to buy and upgrade the first 4-5 ships available, it also gets the local factions on side so you get more missions available. Opens a lot of doors. One thing with Elite is - You don't need missions to do stuff, just get out there and trade/fight/explore and its all good
Another good early note is that the number on outfitting is the size of the weapon/module with 1 being smallest. The Letter is quality.
E = Cheapest
D = Lightest
C = Best value for cash
B = Most armoured
A = Best performance
Size trumps quality most of the time. Weapons only come in 1 quality but have 3 types (fixed/gimbal/turret). On small ships learning to play gimbal is your choice, high level of tracking. Fixed do more damage but obviously are manual aim. Turret turn and lock on even when targets are behind you, if they are in view of the turret they'll shoot. More difficult to manage turrets and they do lower damage than even gimballed. Useful on the bigger ships where you can't turn as fast to keep up with smaller ships.
Final advice - Take the time to play around early game where dying means little. Try those odd looking weapons like frag cannons and railguns. Once you feel confident find the next thing. You can fly great, do you know about the blue throttle zone. When you are managing your speed and turn rates look at pip management and optimising weapon/shield/engine strength. Once you've nailed that experiment with directional thrusters and optimising flying. Finally learn about flight assist off.
There's a ton of things you can learn about and master to optimise your flying, lots of people just get into the biggest most defended ship they can and think that's their combat mastered, then wonder why another player takes them down with ease. With a few tips and pointers, watching a few youtube videos and/or flying with a few player groups that do combat it's fairly easy to get into the finer details which are rewarding when they finally click and you can do some fairly insane stuff turning the ship around to face your target in half the time that you did before etc.
Further Edit: When you get into a Cobra III type ship thats multirole and has a decent internal capacity and jump range try a few other things like mining, passenger missions, rare goods trading, exploration etc. Personally I switch what I'm doing regularly and often do non-profitable stuff like racing with player groups or refuelling stranded players with the Fuel Rats group.
The strength of this game is you make your own stories really. My story was what I'd do in real life If I were in the situation which is pretty much try things until I find something I enjoy. Do that thing until I get bored then repeat. Other people roleplay as a smuggler or trader or mercenary for hire etc. All what you want it to be really, just takes a bit of inspiration and suddenly you realise you've put a few hundred hours into the game and have a to-do / to-try list thats growing longer not shorter.
Whenever you get bored look for something you've never done before, a few revelations for me were the first time I was in combat with a capital ship. Meeting the alien ship. Visiting the supergiant star Betelgeuse. Engineering a racing ship that does 800m/s
Things I could have done within 1hr or just watched a youtube video of but honestly glad I didn't spoil it for myself and broke up the boredom significantly.
Final edit: If you get ~3mil credits from this you can get an Adder/Hauler and do the following for a massive early on payout via Exploration:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-credits-for-anyone-who-has-3-million-credits
Personally I advise taking your time early on but if all you want to do is jump into say an Asp Explorer or whatever quickly my tactic is always combat to 3mil then exploration of locally known Earth Like Worlds. I got about 20mil credits in 3-4 hours play yesterday.
