@Paul Eddington - very kind of you to start this thread, uncannily enough I'd just posted a suggestion into a thread by an epic newbie about landing, and was thinking we should start something like this very thread. I don't know if you remember it or not, but when the game went live on PS4 there was a similar thread started by Ed Lewis, it might be worth digging it out and copying in some of the suggestions from there, or just pointing at it as an additional source of information?
Here's a couple of other suggestions:
Don't fly without rebuy!
On the right hand panel you'll see "insurance cost", NEVER EVER EVER leave starport without Credit balance being more than insurance cost. This figure is the insurance excess if your ship gets destroyed, and if you cannot pay the insurance excess on the rebuy screen, you don't get the ship reinstated and you could find yourself back in the starting sidewinder...
1st forum rule - ASK QUESTIONS RATHER THAN RANT ABOUT "BROKEN GAME"!
It might sound obvious, but the amount of (frustrated) noobs I've seen rant and rave about bad game design / broken mechanics / bug / hackers in the forum regarding an incident that boiled down to user error / first exposure to something new is quite surprising. I remember one guy ranting about how broken the game was and how poorly designed it was because despite his four shield boosters enemies were still going straight through the shields and shredding his hull in no time. It wasn't until we got him calmed down and got him to show us a coriolis build for his ship that it came to light that he was running four boosters, but no shield generator, so there were no shields for the boosters to boost...
Tip for finding landing pad
You know between the radar scanner and the target hologram to the left of that there is the little bubble spirit level "compass"?...
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You've probably figured out that this instrument helps you find your navigation target, but what you may not know is that when you are docking, once you go through the "mailslot" this little instrument points towards your landing pad. This can be particularly handy to know about if your landing pad is one of the ones on the row nearest the mailslot as there is a good chance you'll enter the docking area in such an orientation that you cannot see the pad, with this little trick even if you cannot see your pad, you know what direction it is in relative to your ship.
When upgrading a ship, test your power priorities BEFORE you need them....
Trust me, you don't want to discover that because of your new modules extra power demands that when you deploy hardpoints the ship blacks out. Best way to do this is fly 10km from the station, deploy hardpoints and shoot a couple of rounds at the void. If your ship blacks out (thrusters offline + shields down + life support on back up air breathing like darth vader) right panel, modules tab, power priorities, start to set lower priority modules to higher numbers. For example, when fighting you aren't flying in supercruise, so you cannot fuel scoop, so put fuel scoop to priority two or lower (bigger number). Similarly, you aren't going to fight your way into a landing pad, so deprioritise docking computer - which is a surprisingly hungry module BTW. Same for supercruise assist, which is also a powerhog. It's also highly unlikely you need your ships weapons while you are in the SRV, so deprioritise SRV hangar. Next up is last resorts, things you don't really want to deprioritise if you can avoid it, but you can live with out them... The first of which would be cargo hatch - you are unlikely to be in a power hungry combat ship mining, so you can deprioritise cargo hatch which is also the cargo scoop, however this will prevent you from sooping up fragments of a ship (materials) you've just destroyed until you retract your hardpoints. Last resort FSD, to shave more power from your baseline power consumption you can deprioritise the FSD, but doing so will make it more difficult to hightail it out of a bad situation as doing this will mean your escape is no longer just a case of retract hardpoints charge FSD and wake out of there; it now is retract guns, wait on FSD rebooting, charge drive, wake out. This is like an extra 15 seconds before you can extricate a dicey situation.
Grab every material you can get your hands on...
Things like fragments of ships you destroy, or chemical elements from mining / SRV malarkys or mission rewards, or scan data from targeting and scanning virtually everything you come across, you will need them later on when you start to go to the "engineers" and craft upgrades to your ships modules. Even if you end up with a glut of any given material or data type, you can trade them at materials brokers manufactured / raw / encoded respectively.
Bind Supercruise and Hyperjump to different buttons rather than one FSD button...
Simple bindings change, change your FSD button from the default simple one button for charging both modes of FSD to having one button for hyperjumps and one for supercruise. Why? Often times you'll plot a course to a new star system, and when you go to jump to that system you cannot do so because a planet is between you and that star, so you need to move to get the star out of your road, but you cannot supercruise because when you press the fsd button it wants to hyperjump to your new star system, meaning you need to deselect the star, supercruise past the planet, replot your course to the new star and hyperjump to it. But, if you have separate buttons for hyperjump and supercruise, in the same scenario with the target star system being blocked by a planet preventing you to jump straight to it, you can press the other button and supercruise until you have a clear line of sight to the new star system then hyperjump.
Tip for efficient planetary landings, saves a lot of time / frustration
When approaching a planetary starport, try and set yourself up in "orbital cruise" such that your distance to the starport is roughly the same as your altitude, that puts you in a 1:1 glide slope, 45° on the pitch ladder, this is important as "glide mode", the 2,500m/s transition only works between 5° and 60° pitch. If you find yourself outside those angles when you drop from orbital cruise the ship will display a message glide aborted angle too steep/shallow (delete as appropriate). This message means you aren't gliding in at 2,500m/s, instead, the ship/fsd is leaving you something like 50-200km from target but in slow space on thrusters at a couple of hundred metres per second, which could translate at anything up to fifteen minutes of very boring slow flight.
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I'm presuming you omitted the 'never' here. Only time to submit is against a player, but since most of the rest of your list is 'be scared of Open' I guess not.
