Throw back thread how did you make money in Elite II and III, what other activities did you do?

[Muzz UK]

Honestly, and this comes form a guy that literally wasted hours by thousands in both Elite II Frontier and III First Encounter, I can't go back to play the old ones.
Even more strangely Elite (1984) is easier to grab again for me.

Why?

Mostly the first Elite was way more stable, II and III had more features (loved the adoralbe gringeworthy videos of the bases personnel) - and especially the III has very good planetary graphic/landing , for the time.

That said a lot of gameplay doesn't really cut it anymore. (Mostly talking about Elite II here)

1st- whenever you jumped in a new system you ended up at the very far outskirts of said system and you had to rtavel all the way back to the core. WHile this wasn't really terrible, it could take sometimes even ten minutes BUT... you were NOT flying the ship. Essentially you chose a destination, clicked once on it, clicked again for autopilot and then one more click to Max-Time Acceleration.

I used to like it- but in the end it wasn't very gamey- plus is many occasions the navigational system simply slowed down too much and couldn't catch up some planets.


2nd- You couldn't buy ships and store them. One ship only- the one you fly.

3rd- OUtfitting and Liveries/decoration was totally absent.

4th- Interface wasn't that good or useful.

5th- The. Fragging. Musics. UGH! Sounds effect where bad but still bearable.

6th- THe Newtonian physics was quite the rage and in some ways I liked it- but to be fair combat in Elite (1984) was better, for me.

7th- My landing gear never got any damage from Micro-meteorites.

8th- Single player was cool but I would have killed for Multi Crew, back then. Yes I'm one of the (apparently few) that are happy with MultiCrew (especially in view of the upcoming Mining and Exploration overhaul).

9th- PLANETARY FLIGHT WAS CRAP! Guys, let's be honest- yes, back then we could almost land everywhere but there was little to no reason to do it! It wasn't engaging, it wasn't fun, it wasn't graphically nice, and the atmosphere was completely non-ingfluential. I'm happy to wayt to see Elite Dangerous doing it right.


That said- there were some cool stuff...

- You had a (slightly modified- it was a bit squashed to allow for the limited bittage of those PC) Galaxy : all hundreds of billion of systems in a single 1.44 MB disk,
- you could end up with some specific ships (included a Thaargoid Heavy fighter),
- you could fit some quite COOL stuff like Nuclear Weapons, Military weaponry and Drives,
- you had RECON MISSIONS! with camera and all! (But planetary flight was still crap)
- the bullettin where cool and gave lore, context and hint about missions,
- ORRERY!
- A second, modifiable ORRERY! (you could speed up the time or rewind it)
- Taxes for landing, parking fee and so on
- some mission included haggling for reward and stuff.
- all in all fitting was simpler as there were no slots b ut just "available tonnage"
- some bugs would allow you to have lotsa cash and impossible ships (in some cases you could break the game logic and end up with thousands of tons of internal space available for kitting, WOWZA)
- You had to hire crew (which was still actually useless in gameplay terms...)
- Single player only and as many save states as you want.

Basically was a different game for different times- To be brutally honest, while I love Elite Dangerous deeply- I'm also dying to see some of the old features back.

Nothing wrong with repetitive mono music

Do do do do dooooooooooooooooooooooooooo do do do dooooo dooo doooooo do da da da daaaaaaaaaaaa da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

[Non Grata]

Nothing wrong with repetitive mono music

Do do do do dooooooooooooooooooooooooooo do do do dooooo dooo doooooo do da da da daaaaaaaaaaaa da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Is that all you want to say to us?

 

[Han_Zen]

I just traded in safe systems, like Sol/Barnard star until I had enough.

Because of the star dreamer, it was about 20sec from station to station.
The only challenge was to get crew for the big ships.

One time I went from a fresh start to Elite, ower a weekend in FFE.

Those games were a bit to easy/quick, If you knew them well.

 

[Bounder]

I just traded in safe systems, like Sol/Barnard star until I had enough.

Because of the star dreamer, it was about 20sec from station to station.
The only challenge was to get crew for the big ships.

One time I went from a fresh start to Elite, ower a weekend in FFE.

Those games were a bit to easy/quick, If you knew them well.

Elite in two days? That's like what, 6,000 kills... in 48 hours? 6000 / 48 = 125 kills per hour, or just over two a minute.

But that of course assumes you did it all on one life, without dying... in practice, at least half your kills will never have counted towards your rank, because you died mid-combat, so that'd be 9,000 in 48 hours, or 4 a minute, every minute, without eating, sleeping or answering any calls..

But then there's only so many kills available per system before you have to move on - and sometimes they're empty when you jump in - so if we assume each system had an average of ten NPC's, and they were somehow all in the same place at the same time, so you didn't have to fly around or wait for them to reach you, you must've been jumping every 3 minutes - that's selecting the system from the map, hyperspacing, immediately finding 10 NPC's and killing them, in 3 minutes... every 3 minutes, for 48 hours solid.

But of course you still must've needed fuel, no? Given how certifiably leet you most evidently are, let's assume you didn't pick up a single scratch, had no equipment failures, no mis-jumps, and never needed to buy more missiles or chaff, so never had to bother with outfitting or repairs - how did you refuel? Were you using military drives, to make space for the oversized beam weapons you must've been relying on? Cause then you need some time to get rid of the radioactives, too, before you can buy more fuel, or maybe scoop it from your legions of easy & quick NPC's? Or maybe you just used regular hydrogen fuel, and scooped from stars and planets? In which case you only had room for a 1 MW beam laser, perhaps 4 MW, tops?

Because if you did need to spend any time on repairs and outfitting, or navigating or mission selection (to get more targets), then we're down to less than 20 seconds per kill, big ship or small, non-stop throughout the w/e..

It usually takes me over a year or two to make Elite, and i thought i played quite a bit..

As for 20 secs between stations - yep, you can do it in much less in-system, but surely the point is you don't have to use max time acceleration everywhere - you can use less, or none at all, so it's entirely elective, not enforced. For instance i often choose to fly FA-off for whole journeys, just using manual thruster burns, and keeping the speed low enough to be able to enjoy playing with the gravity fields i'm passing through, or making close passes by other planets en route etc. etc.

So in FE2 and FFE you can for example fly to the moon in about 1 second... or you can do it in real-time, in about 20 minutes - without using any time acceleration at all! Flying between bodies in real-time is all but impossible in ED - it'd take 15 hours to reach the moon in 'normal space'.. rather dull and boring gameplay, by your blistering standards, surely?


All in all it sounds like you had a pretty bad weekend there, dementedly hacking through countless thousands of hapless NPCs without a single moment's respite or nourishment, and on max stardreamer everywhere, not once playing with gravity or planet surfaces or manually landing or easing off stardreamer to pan around and take in the passing scenery.. all for what? That's obviously not a 'fun' ordeal to put oneself through, in any respect - it's as if the only plausible motivation for taking on such a feat would be for some kind of... of bragging rights? Is that it?

But then that's the great thing about bragging, eh? You ain't actually got to have done the thing you're claiming to have done, cuz it's just a bit of banter at the end of the day, right? I mean who's gonna know any better? Sorry to rumble ya, not cool.. ;P

 

[Manticore]

In the original Elite(s) I did a ton of piracy and mining..... two things I have done very little of in ED.

 

[Jaffz]

FE2: Trading, there was a system where precious gems were illegal, and I was paid to take them away at a couple of thousand credits a tonne and then sell them elsewhere. Double double profit. It was fun till I got all the ships. I'm in the same boat with this game

 

[Bounder]

Honestly, and this comes form a guy that literally wasted hours by thousands in both Elite II Frontier and III First Encounter, I can't go back to play the old ones.
Even more strangely Elite (1984) is easier to grab again for me.

Why?

Mostly the first Elite was way more stable, II and III had more features (loved the adoralbe gringeworthy videos of the bases personnel) - and especially the III has very good planetary graphic/landing , for the time.

That said a lot of gameplay doesn't really cut it anymore. (Mostly talking about Elite II here)

1st- whenever you jumped in a new system you ended up at the very far outskirts of said system and you had to rtavel all the way back to the core. WHile this wasn't really terrible, it could take sometimes even ten minutes BUT... you were NOT flying the ship. Essentially you chose a destination, clicked once on it, clicked again for autopilot and then one more click to Max-Time Acceleration.

I used to like it- but in the end it wasn't very gamey- plus is many occasions the navigational system simply slowed down too much and couldn't catch up some planets.

That continuity of travel from A to B is one of the things ED is sorely lacking IMHO - i absolutely loathe having every single star slammed in my face on every single jump - it completely devalues the experience of electing to make a close approach to a star in the first place, but moreover you're jumping into the middle of a system - often at the wrong damned star - and then having to zig-zag back out to your actual destination.

I much prefer leaving one system and entering the next at its periphery, then choosing to fly in to whatever inner planets and bases, past the outer gas giants or companion stars and asteroid fields etc. - that continuity of travel from A to B helps seal the impression that star systems are neighboring bubbles of space that you're actually moving between...

Rather than the 'curtain fall / set change' feel of ED, where the hyperspace key magically redraws the system around you whilst showing you the same animated loading screen before slamming the next star in your face..


As for "not flying the ship" - too noob to lay off the autopilot once in a while? I fly my ships all the time, AP's optional you know.. However you cannot fly the ships in ED, period (they're only capable of moving via hyperspace - in 'normal space' they're basically glued to the spot, physically incapable of accelerating anywhere under their own power). If you honestly find the up-a-bit, left-a-bit supercruise grind more entertaining, yet you also 'had' to use max time acceleration and autopilot when flying actual meaningful 'space ships' with real basic physics - the two don't seem to reconcile? You like being forced to go slow and manual, but when given the option to go fast and automatic you choose to do nothing else?

You do know you can choose to fly manual / FA-on between planets in the previous games? So still nudging it up-a-bit, left-a-bit, only difference being that the speed and distances change intuitively and linearly, using as much or as little time acceleration as you like, instead of showing you meaningless and inexplicable stats with a farcical "25% throttle at 7 secs" deceleration procedure? No one could honestly believe ED's a better game, not on those grounds at least?

Be honest - it's just graphics snobbery isn't it? It's gotta be - i just can't see what else ED has going for it... it's superficially pretty, but deceiving, and vacuous. FE2 and FFE actually do what they say on the tin. For me, FFED3D can also hold its own on the GFX front.. but most of all it's genuinely compelling gameplay, where ED is just droll and uninspiring..

 

[Winterwalker]

FE2 .. I photographed a LOT of secret bases.

 

[Kerrash]

FE2 - Sol/Barnard's milk run until I could afford a Viper with a mining laser for sniping

 

[Sapyx]

Ah, FE2/FFE. Played them both, back in the day. Never discovered the Sol-Barnard's piracy-free trade exploit. Made all my money the honest way, by trading. Never made it to Elite rank; I tended to avoid combat, simply by getting an Asp (one of the fastest ships in the game) and outrunning all the pirates: switch off the autopilot, engines to max acceleration, time-accelerator to full and then full burn towards the destination and switch the autopilot back on at the last second. How a ship travelling through normal space at 1/3 lightspeed managed to come to a full stop in just a few seconds is beyond me.

What I liked to do in-game was explore. Largely armchair-exploration without actually flying the ship there, but including actual flying to places if I found something interesting. I even made my own map of the entire FE2/FFE inhabited space, marking all the interesting star systems on it.

I played the FFE storyline out to the full, getting the Thargoid scout ship to fly around in. Doing 600 LY jumps was cool, and I could finally do some real, beyond-the-frontier exploration.

In FE2/FFE, every star system within 1000 LYs of Sol was "Explored", you could click on it and view the system map. "Exploration" of the Unexplored systems beyond 1000 LY was essentially impossible in normal FE2/FFE ships, because it took six game-time months to reach the frontier in the ship with the biggest jump range (the Asp) and if you didn't get your hyperdrive serviced every six months, it had a high probability of disintegrating and turning into several tonnes of rubbish in your hold, leaving you stranded in interstellar space. And no, I never discovered the "wormhole bug" that allowed you to teleport to star systems that were exactly 655.35 LY away.

So, once I had the Thargoid scout I could do some real deep-space exploration; I explored until I found my first Earth-like, which didn't take long (ELWs were much more common in the FE2/FFE galaxy). But... it was all quite hollow, as there was no actual recognition from the game that I was actually doing any exploring. No scanners, no credits, no "Congratulations! You were first to discover..." screen. Exploration in ED is much more satisfying.

 

[Spaceman Si]

Started out trading, eventually got enough to get an Imperial Courier (which was an incredible ship, and way more potent than the current iCourier, or so it seems), and then did a lot of photography of bases / bounty hunting.

I actually liked the more chess-like combat that you got with the full Newtonian flight model, even though I admit that it took me a few weeks to master it. But in the end, I found it quite possible to vector my ship in the most likely way to cross the target's vector whilst having the right attitude to let it have it with the 20Mw (or was it 30, can never remember!) beam laser. I always had an escape vector laid in so I could just start up the engines and get out of there if need be as well. Fun times.

The auto-pilot "not catching the planets" sometimes had me puzzled for a while until I worked out what was going on. If the auto pilot worked out the shortest route to your destination, it sometimes routed you to the planet target in the same direction of motion as the planet, i.e you were chasing the target in it's orbit - this looks like it is going to work to start with, but as you get closer, the difference in the target speed and the maximum speed that your engines can achieve becomes obvious No engine could create the delta necessary to catch a planet up by directly chasing it! So you often had to use the orrery to plot a suitable route and fly it yourself tto be sure you were aiming off correctly - you can always catch a planet if you know where it is going to be, and aim off accordingly, and it is always successful when running down the orbit towards the planet, as it comes to you

That Orrery was marvellous. Amazing how something like that was possible on an old Amiga 25 years ago, and is now seemingly too difficult to implement in a reasonable time-frame

 

[Marc_Hicks]

A little bit of fun and a throw back to the older Elite games for the vets here. I played far too many hours of Elite II and III in the 90s. During the 2000s I would still install and revisit every now and then. I found my game play nearly always followed the same pattern lol. I remember as a 11 year old being confused as to why I couldn't land on certain planets and then my brother showed me they were gas giants ha.

How did you make you guys make your money? I used to start by doing fruit veg, animal meat and computer runs from Sol to Barnard's Star and back again. Once I could afford a Lion Transport, Tiger Trader or ASP I would upgrade my ship depending on mood.

Once I built up enough cash for a bigger ship I'd start trading illegal goods to Daedalus in Sol as you could bribe the police :-D

Eventually I'd get bored and travel to the imperial systems and get myself an Imperial Courier which I consider the coolest ship in those older game. Personally don't think the new courier has as much character. I would then return to Federation space to do assassinations. I played about with hyperspace forced mis jumps and did practice plantery landings and dropping off the MB40 mining machine but I was never lucky enough to find more than water, minerals or low value goods.

Did anyone ever go long distance and see how far out they could get? For such an old game even in the early 2000s there was still a lot to do. I would like to say the crime system was pretty good and being denied docking permission and chased off by the police was pretty fun.

Another fun thing to do was buy a Panther Clipper load up with shields and plasma accelerator and see how many police ships you could kill.

In II, I mostly made my money by flying passenger missions (whilst learning to avoid any that sent me to Alpha Centauri), missions for the Federal Navy &-once I felt confident enough-the odd Assassination Mission .

 

[krylite]

In FFE, after or during the jagged-banner/wiccan ware race, soholia relief, "Rockford academy" bombing stories, I would try to move up to the cobra mk iii, then try to catch on "WANTED: high prices paid for <commodity>" missions. Usually robotics or medicines. Hopped around ships such as the Tiger Trader, Moray Starboat, Kestral. Eventually moved on to my favorite ship , the imperial courier (the real medium ship one with the angled pylons, not the jetfighter with the F-16 view whatever ED has named). Continued on with trading missions in either Imperial Courier, or eventually Imperial Trader and stayed near Sol, then would catch the Turner Argent missions. I didn't really care for the python or the others. After that it would keeping the Turner Argent and trading more volume until the invulnerable-shielded-rammer Panther Clipper or exploring in the Imperial Explorer, or end up the in-game narrative with the Thargoid scout and then just do naval missions which was fun with the thargoid death ray, but I never continued enough to make it to elite. I rarely did assasination missions and did more of the "snapshot" or bombing missions. Eventually, X:BTF and X2 arrived and I eventually left FFE for those substitutes and others until mainly FSX for a decade until now ED.

I would always subscribe to "Universal Scientist", "Federal Times", "RIG" etc. and catch up on the developments of Dr. Innutu, Ms. Parsnips latest gossip, and the personals. Sometimes I would let the autopilot and ship cruise on approach at 1x stardreamer speed and let it run while away from the computer, pretending rl was the "ship" and checking the screen occasionally as the ship traveled sublight for hours or days ( like described in sci-fi novels) , required to approach a planet destination. ( I had done the manual deceleration to landing estimations without autopilot/damaged autopilot too.)

 

[Jmanis]

I made money shipping Imperial Slaves between Vequess and Facece... with no shortage of military couriers between the two either. Of course, Assassination/Recon/Bombing missions for the imperial navy were the next logical step.

 

[Hacker#451563]

Once I had a decent combat ship on the old Specy 48K I would press Shift-F as I entered hyperspace and then come out in Witch Space facing a bunch of Thargoids to blow up. Lucrative and exciting for a young lad in a tripped-out Cobra III

Repeat for bounty and Tharglet scoopables.

 

[smiths121]

I dread to think how many hours were spent in FE2 over the years. Used to do a lot of trading between Sol and Barnard's Star taking farm machinery one way then robotics the next. Trading ships until I couldn't get anything bigger. Used to fast forward time waiting for a bulletin board message paying double for robotics

After fortunes had been made started on the rank grind. Lots of courier missions from the naval stations at Eta Cassiopeia then into recon and assassinations. Took forever getting to Elite but I did manage it.
to jettison it and it would
There was also a cheat on the Amiga version where you could click just to the right of something to jettison it and it wouldn't jettison but still gave you the cargo space back. End up with -30000 and a cobra mk3 with 1000 shield boosters and a large plasma accelerator. That was always good for a laugh.

I rolled into Ceos for the first time last night and saw all the delivery missions... had a pang of nostalgia for that

I LOVE this game.

Edit: Got the system wrong. Who still has the map from FE2?

Before ED came out , I think Jade has a link to an exe that just did the galaxy map from FE2. I wen to see if I could find the link after seeing your post. Alas most of the sites have gone now, so I could not find the link. Shame.

In terms of me. I preferred FFE to FE2. I still have my FFE floppy disk box set. Osprey X down in Empire space doing delivery missions. Now that was a broken ship. Military Drive, ECM and a decent laster on a very small fighter chasis, with some cargo space. 32LY range if I remember. It was so fast, if you jumped short differences time would fo backwards due to rounding errors!

Simon

 

[ogrando]

In Frontier Elite II i make money simply buying and selling expensive goods, like robot, computer,... and then smuggling luxury goods and liquor into the Van Mannens (or as you write) theocratic system. Without doing missions. And When i have medium or big trasports ship with payload of 500, 1000, 2000ton I made big money.
Instead in elite dangerous I find it's difficult to make money with the transport like a freelancer, I do not find a really good commercial route, and the only way are do missions and Community Goals.
Having said this remaining in the business of commerce.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Worked my way up to a Panther Clipper via trade, combat, and missions.

Then armed it to hell and took missions to photo/bomb military installations. Then parked my ship above one and went to work.

 

[Komemiute]

That continuity of travel from A to B is one of the things ED is sorely lacking IMHO - i absolutely loathe having every single star slammed in my face on every single jump - it completely devalues the experience of electing to make a close approach to a star in the first place, but moreover you're jumping into the middle of a system - often at the wrong damned star - and then having to zig-zag back out to your actual destination.

I much prefer leaving one system and entering the next at its periphery, then choosing to fly in to whatever inner planets and bases, past the outer gas giants or companion stars and asteroid fields etc. - that continuity of travel from A to B helps seal the impression that star systems are neighboring bubbles of space that you're actually moving between...

Rather than the 'curtain fall / set change' feel of ED, where the hyperspace key magically redraws the system around you whilst showing you the same animated loading screen before slamming the next star in your face..


As for "not flying the ship" - too noob to lay off the autopilot once in a while? I fly my ships all the time, AP's optional you know.. However you cannot fly the ships in ED, period (they're only capable of moving via hyperspace - in 'normal space' they're basically glued to the spot, physically incapable of accelerating anywhere under their own power). If you honestly find the up-a-bit, left-a-bit supercruise grind more entertaining, yet you also 'had' to use max time acceleration and autopilot when flying actual meaningful 'space ships' with real basic physics - the two don't seem to reconcile? You like being forced to go slow and manual, but when given the option to go fast and automatic you choose to do nothing else?

You do know you can choose to fly manual / FA-on between planets in the previous games? So still nudging it up-a-bit, left-a-bit, only difference being that the speed and distances change intuitively and linearly, using as much or as little time acceleration as you like, instead of showing you meaningless and inexplicable stats with a farcical "25% throttle at 7 secs" deceleration procedure? No one could honestly believe ED's a better game, not on those grounds at least?

Be honest - it's just graphics snobbery isn't it? It's gotta be - i just can't see what else ED has going for it... it's superficially pretty, but deceiving, and vacuous. FE2 and FFE actually do what they say on the tin. For me, FFED3D can also hold its own on the GFX front.. but most of all it's genuinely compelling gameplay, where ED is just droll and uninspiring..

Yeah... sure.
I bet you didn't play monre than an hour of Elite II.

 

[Han_Zen]

Elite in two days? That's like what, 6,000 kills... in 48 hours? 6000 / 48 = 125 kills per hour, or just over two a minute.

But that of course assumes you did it all on one life, without dying... in practice, at least half your kills will never have counted towards your rank, because you died mid-combat, so that'd be 9,000 in 48 hours, or 4 a minute, every minute, without eating, sleeping or answering any calls..

But then there's only so many kills available per system before you have to move on - and sometimes they're empty when you jump in - so if we assume each system had an average of ten NPC's, and they were somehow all in the same place at the same time, so you didn't have to fly around or wait for them to reach you, you must've been jumping every 3 minutes - that's selecting the system from the map, hyperspacing, immediately finding 10 NPC's and killing them, in 3 minutes... every 3 minutes, for 48 hours solid.

But of course you still must've needed fuel, no? Given how certifiably leet you most evidently are, let's assume you didn't pick up a single scratch, had no equipment failures, no mis-jumps, and never needed to buy more missiles or chaff, so never had to bother with outfitting or repairs - how did you refuel? Were you using military drives, to make space for the oversized beam weapons you must've been relying on? Cause then you need some time to get rid of the radioactives, too, before you can buy more fuel, or maybe scoop it from your legions of easy & quick NPC's? Or maybe you just used regular hydrogen fuel, and scooped from stars and planets? In which case you only had room for a 1 MW beam laser, perhaps 4 MW, tops?

Because if you did need to spend any time on repairs and outfitting, or navigating or mission selection (to get more targets), then we're down to less than 20 seconds per kill, big ship or small, non-stop throughout the w/e..

It usually takes me over a year or two to make Elite, and i thought i played quite a bit..

As for 20 secs between stations - yep, you can do it in much less in-system, but surely the point is you don't have to use max time acceleration everywhere - you can use less, or none at all, so it's entirely elective, not enforced. For instance i often choose to fly FA-off for whole journeys, just using manual thruster burns, and keeping the speed low enough to be able to enjoy playing with the gravity fields i'm passing through, or making close passes by other planets en route etc. etc.

So in FE2 and FFE you can for example fly to the moon in about 1 second... or you can do it in real-time, in about 20 minutes - without using any time acceleration at all! Flying between bodies in real-time is all but impossible in ED - it'd take 15 hours to reach the moon in 'normal space'.. rather dull and boring gameplay, by your blistering standards, surely?


All in all it sounds like you had a pretty bad weekend there, dementedly hacking through countless thousands of hapless NPCs without a single moment's respite or nourishment, and on max stardreamer everywhere, not once playing with gravity or planet surfaces or manually landing or easing off stardreamer to pan around and take in the passing scenery.. all for what? That's obviously not a 'fun' ordeal to put oneself through, in any respect - it's as if the only plausible motivation for taking on such a feat would be for some kind of... of bragging rights? Is that it?

But then that's the great thing about bragging, eh? You ain't actually got to have done the thing you're claiming to have done, cuz it's just a bit of banter at the end of the day, right? I mean who's gonna know any better? Sorry to rumble ya, not cool.. ;P

It was in in much less than 48 hours of game time.

It's actually quite easy, if you know what to do.

Steps:

1. Make money. Start with the Soholia mission for 50,000 move to Sol and do trading to Barnard star until you have the ship and cash you want. This is quick and 100% safe.
2. Go to Empire and do courier missions between Facece and Veques until you have enough rank for the nuke missions.
3. Do the Thargoid missions, when they pop up (this is the part that takes some time). Don't destroy the last INRA satellite. Get the Thargoid warship.
4. Now you are under constant attack by INRA ships that you can one shot with your Thargoid laser. If you are quick with the hand, you can probably manage 20 kills a minute. Elite comes quickly.

I still have the save games. Here is a picture.

Spoiler