RES hunting still guarantees a steady income, especially at your current point of progression, but is overshadowed by other activities later on if you compare them cr/h wise.
Passenger missions: In your case, I would start by getting a small or medium ship with a nice jump range outfitted for passenger transport and do sightseeing missions. As always, being allied with multiple factions at the station is advised. Maybe also start at one with a "tourist" economy.
You cold start with either a dolphin as a cheap dedicated passenger ship that can fit luxury cabins(
ignore, Horizons only), or get an AspX that will serve you as a multirole and long range exploration ship for a long time.
Take note where the passengers want to travel, there are three types of missions:
1) Bulk passengers - These look like "Transport 132 game developers to Hutton Orbital", great if you have a big ship and can stack many of them.
2) Long rang VIPs - "Dr. Frankenstein wants to go to the center and vomit into the black hole there, for science!" - These have a high payout, but require thousands of ly travel, beware.
3) VIP Sightseeing - "Rich Tourist wants to visit locations X and Y" - These are the ones you'll want, all target locations are within the bubble. READ the mission details, some passengers are wanted or generally high maintenace. Start easy and don't go overboard with the number of tourists and targets. You don't have access to engineers to enhance your jump range, so look at how far out the target systems are (and remember you also have to fly the whole way back).
Here's a starter build with one big first class cabin to start with, you may want to switch the cabin with the fuel scoop slot for faster scooping and/or downgrade the cabin to only fit business/economy passengers though. Stuff in the smaller slots is optional, but the scanners will gain you some nice exploration profit and rank.
Edit: As for the payout: I can make 20 millions an hour stacking VIP passengers in my Orca, but I have access to engineers and guardian tech which you don’t atm. Still, sightseeing should yield comparable if not better payouts to bounty hunting for you.
Another very well paying activity is transporting cargo, either via a simple transport mission or a "source and return" mission where you need to buy commodities elsewhere and bring them back. Most of these require with a high cargo capacity though for them to be worth your time, but if you keep a lookout there's sometimes that one easy "bring 120t of stuffonium to the neighbouring system for 2mil" that you can do with one of the smaller ships. Another viable way of earning bucks hauling cargo is finding a system in the "outbreak" state, then bringing in basic medicines from a nearby system.
Also weekly look up the current Community Goals (there's two new ones every thursday), sometimes there's a lucrative one where you need to bring in commodities, and very regularly there's a bounty hunting one.
And most importantly, the forum mantra:
Never fly without rebuy! Godspeed, CMDR o7
