IOW, once a detailed surface scan has been turned in, that body is no longer available to be rediscovered.
My sojourn into uninhabited space had to be cut short. Too many close encounters with stars dropped my hull below 50% so I put in at the nearest Federation outpost and sold my cartographic data. My visits to the Spirograph Nebula and Witch Head Nebula got me 8 million plus my name on several first discoveries, mainly around Spirograph.
The name is Holdstock if you’re ever out that way.
After giving it time to fix a few things, I have gone back to the game and am having more fun. It also helps that I have a better control scheme (a 360 pad).
I’m currently grinding cash to get my Hauler. Interdictions are much less frequent and everything seems a lot less picky than it was before.
The Feds decided to hate me again while I out exploring. Sold my Type 6, bought a heavily armed Viper, and went about improving relations.
With pretty much everyone neutral toward me once more, I sold the Viper and bought an Asp. With two point defenses, two gimbaled beam lasers, four turreted cannons, very strong shields, almost as much cargo capacity as possible, and enough power distribution for one laser to fire continuously with all four pips. Anything less than an Anaconda opening up on me is toast!
You might say anything less than an Anaconda opening up on me gets opened up by me. 
On an Eagle, what is better Class 2 shields or Class 3 shields? I’m within the class 2 mass rating.
As long as your ship remains below the optimum mass for a Class 2, get the highest rated Class 2 you can afford. Shields lose effectiveness as hull mass increases above optimal.
Tired of your HUD looking like it belongs on an '80s amber monochrome monitor? Want to change the color? Here’s how!
Here’s mine: a light blue with white, yellow, and salmon accents, similar to this.
<MatrixRed> 0.25, 0.5, 1 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 0.5, 0 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 1, 0, 0 </MatrixBlue>
Thar’s Painite in them thar rocks!
HIP 93377 4 Ring A
Spent the past ~4 hours mining, got about 700K; half of which came from 7 tons of painite.
Smaller rocks seem to be the best for higher value yields such as painite, gold, osmium, silver, etc.
So, I just got this game on the steam sale. It’s going to take some getting used to.
I’m on mouse and keyboard. The first tutorial had me spinning in circles every time I moved the mouse to try to steer. I changed it so that the mouse just moves the camera up/down or sideways. I tried the first combat tutorial, the enemy ran circles around me, so I take it the mouse isn’t the best way to maneuver?
I know, people have said get a flight stick or controller. Thing is, I’ve never used those so it likely will just add an extra layer of frustration. Ah well, I’ll see what I can do.
Seriously. At the very least get a basic controller.
I’m looking into it, thanks. Do you have any suggestions? At my local Best Buy, flightsticks start at $100, so I’m not sure I’d want to jump into buying something like that that I’d end up never using that much.
What’s the cheapest solution I could get away with and still be able to play the game?
Is there a minimum number of buttons or control sticks I’d have to look at? I’m guessing a simple joystick with just a trigger isn’t going to work ( if they even sell those any more) 
You’ll want at least two sticks: one for pitch/yaw and one for roll. You should be able to get an Xbox 360 controller for less than $20.
I found a Logitech controller for $36. The xbox controllers seemed to be around $60 (CDN)
I need to figure out bindings perhaps, but there doesn’t seem to be a control for yaw at all, just rolling/pitch, and side to side/up/down thrusts.
I just reach over to the keyboard for yaw and other functions I haven’t found mapped to the controller, like landing gear.
I tried some of the tutorials with the controller. one problem I was having with the mouse is it was sending me into uncontrolled spins because I have a habit of moving my mouse slightly while doing other things (like shooting guns) so the controller seems to be stable on that point.
I’m still doing tutorials. Not sure where to start in the main game. I did try docking in the main game, and got fined $400 heh. Is there a way to start over?
Go into Options -> Controller to see the default maps. I changed mine to reflect what I’ve been using for Oolite, the open source Elite remake.
From the main menu, Options -> Clear Save.
Before you go for a controller, try the going into options and change the mouse x-axis from roll to yaw, and bind roll left to “A” and roll right to “D”. Now the ship will fly where you point the mouse (although because the developers apparently don’t know that spaceships don’t fly in atmosphere with ailerons , the ship will still pitch much faster than it can yaw). That gets rid of the uncontrolled spin every time you try to move, and should easily allow you to beat a controller-using ship of equal experience. You still want to get used to “roll-right then pitch up” to quickly aim at something far to your right rather than just “yaw right,” but you can develop that instinct slowly and still have control with this binding set.
Other good control bindings: You can change from one key (J) for both supercruise and hypedrive to separate keys for each, and I bound system map to (5) and galaxy map to (6), useful for exploring where you’ll need to bring up each of those about thirty times an hour.
Also, by default the “0” (zero) key is defined to “select the next system in your current path”, which is nice because the destination gets lost every time you target something else. Took me a while to find that.
As for landing, you were fined because either you didn’t ask for permission to land first, you landed at the wrong pad, or your time ran out before you landed. To ask permission, go to the contacts panel (shift + A, “Q” or “E” until you get to the “contacts” tab, select the station, space, select “Request docking”, space). If they deny you, get closer. Put away your hardpoints (“U”) before you get close so you don’t accidentally fire on them.
Combat takes a lot of getting used to. Aside from the pathological default control bindings, the other “quirk” of combat is that your maneuverability is affected by your speed (and higher/lower isn’t better – your maximum maneuverability is when your throttle’s in the center of the blue area) and the amount of power you’re diverting to your engines (up arrow to give it more, down arrow to return toward the defaults).
For starting out with combat (against easy opponents), begin by putting your speed into the blue with W/S/X keys, then hit right arrow and up arrow a couple of times each to move all power into weapons and engines (you don’t really need your shields/systems recharging in easy battles). Identify your target on the main radar (or hit “H” to target hostile if they’ve already hit you), then use the roll keys (“A” and “D” if you remapped them, otherwise the x-axis) to get your enemy somewhere on a vertical line with the center of the bottom radar. Then just pitch forward/backward until they’re in front of you, target (T) if necessary, and fire away. If you find yourself in too close (you always seem to be bumping or nearly bumping the other ship, or you’re just making tight circles around each other), hit “TAB” once to boost away and get some distance, then repeat. It’ll become second nature after a couple tries.
The devs didn’t want a game with everyone going into controlled flat spins in a vain attempt to get the drop on their opponent so they made pitch & roll thrusters more powerful than yaw thrusters.
Thanks for all the advice TimeWinder and Skywatcher. I’ll try putting all this advice into practice! I’ll probably stick to the tutorials until I’m more comfortable.