Just don't turn up at all. Unlike FL, they won't actually bug you about it all if you don't turn up for missions. It may be worth perservering with the story until the point where you get the mercury since that gives you a good bursary to get started with, but it's really not necessary. I found it far more enjoyable to start out on my own and ignore the storyline, especially since the cutscenes look like as$.
A TL is a good capship to buy first, especially for trading. You can basically buy all the products from a station (e.g. 5000 units of energy cells) and then transport them around with the TL. If you buy a couple of mercurys (or equivalent) and have them escort the ship, you can get them to ferry commodities from the ship to each station that wants them, and you'll find yourself earning money at a fantastic rate. The best way to do this is to use the script editor and write a script for the transports - savs you babysitting them the whole time. I now have 4 TL's roaming the universe with a full complement of mercurys, and they simply buy up all the cheap goods and sell them later on for a profit.
Another piece of advice - don't buy an M1 (carrier) until you have bucketloads of cash. It may make a good capship and look very impressive, but it'll cost you about 3 times the price of the ship to outfit it with fighters and defense wings. Without escorting ships it's actually a very easy target - lots of shields but very limited firepower.
Regarding your first factory, I would definitely go for a solar power plant in Akeela's Beacon. The presence of about 5 stars in the system means that the SPP's will be incredibly productive and therefore profitable. There's also an Argon Centaur and (I think) a Split Dragin patrolling the system, which helps protect your investments. As a warning though, once the Khaak start to become more prolific they will target the system more and more frequently. Once you get a smallish empire going you'll be dealing with about 20-ship clusters every 5 minutes or so, so you'll definitely want some defenses in there. Lasertowers are excellent for this, as are M3's. Don't bother with anything bigger, it won't be able to track the fast Khaak fighters and they'll end up swarming it.
As Chips said earlier, capturing enemy ships is an excellent way to make money. I wouldn't recommend it in an M5 - you can't even worry transports in an M5 - but once you get a decent fighter you can make good money from forcing the pilots to eject and selling their ship. Note that if you capture a Khaak M3 with some weapons intact, resist the urge to sell it. The Khaak M3 is an amazing ship.
Another good way to make money once you get a half-decent fighter is to venture into the Xenon systems. It may look scary when you come through the gate and can see entire fleets of Xenon ships, but you can actually outrun mosdt of them if things get hairy. An excellent tactic I've found is (if you have a jumpdrive installed in your ship) to enter the system by one gate and get them all riled up. When the Xenon destroyers and carriers have manuevered towards you and are moving in for the kill, activate the jumpdrive and jump to the other gate in the system. It will then take the ships ages to reverse course and come back at you, giving you time to take out a few ships and escape afterwards.
If you get a chance you should definitely accept the Xenon invasion missions when they appear. They are probably the best-paying missions around but they are extremely hard and very rare. You usually have some time to rally your ships and prepare to defend (unless you accept just as the ships begin invading), and you'll need every second of it. You'll need at least a squadron (say 10-12) of M3's, and preferably some capital ship support as backup. Depending on the difficulty you can have anything from a small figher wing to a battle group composing several destroyers and carriers invading the system, and you get paid credits for however many ships you manage to repel. I forget the most vulnerable systems at the moment, but I think you get asked to help defend the Boron frontier systems (e.g. Menelaus' Frontier) a lot.
If you are offered sector map data in exchange for credits then it is definitely worth it, especially at the start of the game. Make sure you don't already have data on the systems before you do obviously, but it's far easier then exploring all the systems yourself. Especially when you accept a 'taxi' mission and the guy needs to go to a system that you've never heard of, and you end up running around frantically trying to find the system before the time limit runs out.
I'll stop talking in a minute, promise. A common trap to fall into is to build your first factory in Ore Belt. This system is simply a massive asteroid field and some of the asteroid have a huge yield, but unfortunately it's also a prime target for pirates and Khaak. Buy a mineral scanner and scan all the asteroids (if you have the patience) - a there are a couple of asteroids in here with yields of about 500 Ore (I think, don't hold me to that
). Don't begin mining the asteroids here until you've progressed reasonably far into the game though, otherwise you'll spend all of your time defending your property. Once you build up a reasonable fleet take a squadron to the very north of the system, beyond the upper limit of the normal system-map. There's a pirate base up here, and if you destroy it then you'll go a long way towards preventing the pirate attacks in this sector. Be warned that you'll need some heavy firepower to take it out though - every time I've been there it's been guarded by at least a couple of dozen M3's.
Once more tip - avoid the unknown systems until you get a well-shielded ship. The systems are highly radioactive (or whatever) and will eat away at your hull remarkably quickly. I took my M1 in there with plans to colonise the system and had to scramble it out quickly - it only just made it and cost me about 30 million in repairs.
Edit: One final tip. Stay the hell away from Khaak captial ships. You'll need about two or three M2's to take out a Khaak destroyer - the weapons are unbelievably powerful. Best way to do it is to get a flight of smaller fighters to run interference and distract the gunners on the Khaak M2, then get your destroyers to move in to take it out. It will often try and attack the fighters instead and will prevent too much damage to your captial ships, but you will still lose a lot of fighters. Make sure your capships are stocked up with hornet missiles, and as soon as the Khaak shields drop order them to launch everything at it. There's no real way to take these ships down easily due to their weapons - if you ever salvage a Gamma Kyon Emitter then never EVER let it go.
Edited by - Accushot on 10/3/2005 3:53:37 PM
Fri Sep 30, 2005 2:27 am 
).
Just don't forget to save BEFORE you accept them 
). Only the orebelt has a dedicated M6 - simply due to the high volume of fighting that it does).