As much as I love this game, I don't really the see the point in the current permit system.
I find the Federal Navy rank progression (which I personally wouldn't give a damn about were it not for the Solar System Permit that is made dependent on it) to be painfully slow.
Maybe I do something wrong, but (apart form the very first rank) leveling up a single rank in the Federal Navy took me at least 80-100 missions done for some Federal minor factions, and the Solar System Permit comes only at the fourth one (Petty Officer) if I'm not mistaken.
After about 150 hours of gameplay I'm still only a Midshipman, 64% away from the next rank. I can understand that one must work their way up to get the permit as a reward, but is this huge grind (~300+ repetitive missions) really necessary? All I wanted to do (like many other newbie CMDRs) was to make a humble visit to the ancestral home system of mankind before blasting off to explore new systems tens of thousands of lightyears away, but for God's sake, it seems that by the time I finally get that wretched permit, I will be able to afford to jump into the Solar System with an armada of Vultures and Pythons armed to the teeth with the deadliest Kill-O-Zap BFG's on every single hardpoint, capable of exterminating the whole Federal Navy with instakill shots well before the defenders could say "permit, please".
But the bigger problem about the way this permit system is implemented is that it's utterly immersion-breaking.
It would be okay if this permit thingie only meant that you could jump into a restricted system (Sol, for example) all right any time, but if you did that without the permit, then a bunch of local authority ships would interdict you right away, demanding that you leave or die. But this "you cannot even program your FSD to accept the coordinates of a permit-only system" thing is ridiculous. How exactly is it supposed to work? FSD vendors preprogramming the miserable devices that way? No way of bribing them to sell you the thing without the restrictions? No way to steal another FSD in which these systems have already been unlocked? No way to hire some hackers to do that for you? In a galaxy full of pirates and outlaws? Some engineers are capable of doubling the jump range of your FSD but cannot erase two bytes worth of code from it? Really?
How come that war can exist in a galaxy like this in the first place? Couldn't the defenders just lock the enemy out of their homeworlds once for all by simply declaring them permit-only?
I can imagine the almighty Darthvader-class Overlord General of the Imperial Army reporting to His/Her Majesty the Emperor:
"I am terribly sorry, my liege (or whatever the proper intitulation is), but we must delay the planned Grand Imperial Invasion of the Solar System until every last one of our thirty thousand battleship pilots grinded up to the Petty Officer rank, at least, in the Federal Navy."
"What are you talking about, General? Are we going to have thirty thousand officers in our enemy's army?"
"Oh yes, your highness, but you must know that the enemy is way ahead of us. I it was who personally promoted the twenty five thousandth Federal pilot to the rank of Imperial Squire the day before yesterday. I must admit that somehow I had a bad feeling about this, giving military ranks to our enemies and all that, you know, it didn't exactly seem to be the right thing to do, but I had simply no choice. They were working so hard to gain reputation with our minor factions, delivering terabytes of boom time data, sourcing and returning a heck of a lot of tons of water, basic medicines and combat instabilizers."
That's insane.
