X3 terran conflic questions

There seem to be a few X-players here, so instead of registering on another forum just to ask these questions, I'll ask them here. I'm relatively new to the X-series as a whole (I have played X1 a bit in the past, and also dipped my toes in X2).

Anyway, I'm playing as a humble trader, and I've sold my scout ship to be able to afford to buy goods to sell. I've been able to amass just over ½million credits, but running back & forth to trade is getting a bit tedious, and my ship (even with all the speed upgrades) is not fast enough to do any missions, nor does it have any guns. As I don't want to work myself into a corner (like I did in X1, where I ended up with not enough money for it to be worth continuing), I'll ask here.

At this point, what would you recommend that I do? Should I start to look into building industries (the cheapest ones are in the mid 300 000's), or is there anything else that you would recommend that I do?

Naming the thread "questions" in case I have more questions in the future

Fabs require too much commitment , make a mobile mining company for you

Oh! Sorry I didn't see this earlier.

Half a million is a pretty good hunk. How much exploration have you done? Have you gotten a jump drive yet? That makes trading go a LOT faster, as does a docking computer.

There are lots of ways you can go. You could buy a station but I don't think you would have the money to feed it the raw materials it would need. However, you might just barely have enough money to do a "Build a Station" mission if you're lucky enough to find one for a wheat factory or some such. You can double your money fast with one of those.

You could also buy a little scout ship, crank up the engines, give it remote trading software, then start exploring the galaxy. You can operate your trade ship remotely while you explore the galaxy. If you get a mineral scanner on the scout, you can do "scan the asteroid" missions and get paid for exploring sectors. Once you've done a few, those pay pretty well. (After doing several of them, though, you won't be able to scan them all without using a jump drive to get to the next sector.)

One thing I do in the early exploration stage is drop nav satellites in sectors that I consider safe enough to trade in. Particularly in sectors that have shipyards. The bonus pack has some special trading software that lets trading ships attached to stations buy/sell station goods on their own. One of the options on that software is to have the trader stick to sectors that have a satellite in them so I use those satellites to mark where I want them to go. It will be quite awhile before you'll need the bonus pack software but having the sats in place helps in a lot of other ways, too.

I don't have a jump drive yet, and I've done some limited exploring (I basically have explored the rectangle you would get if you drew a line between Kingdom end, Menelau' frontier, Priest's pity & emperor mines). But I'll take your advice and get a scout ship and a scanner, and then learn how to remote-operate my slow trading ship.
Bonus pack is by the way installed. I'll get some of that special software so that I can automate the trading.

What is the main benefit of the satellites? Seeing if competitors are on their way to beating you to the best buyer/seller?

They're quite handy

• If you have one in a sector with a shipyard and you're in a ship with trade extension software then you can buy a ship at that shipyard no matter where you are in the galaxy. Very handy for 'buy me a ship' missions.
• The sat will provide trade information for every known station in the sector. I'm not completely certain about this, but I believe that lets trade ships assigned to a station do a lot better job buying raw materials and selling finished products. It's also likely to help sector and universe traders. (I'm not totally certain because I have tons of sats up by the time I start buying my own stations.)
• As I outlined above, the bonus pack's special trading software has tons of options - one of which is to limit trading to just sectors with satellites in them. If you plan ahead, you can use sats to mark "safe" sectors for your traders.
• If you're more into military actions than trading, you can drop sats in the more dangerous sectors so you can see where enemy ships are. Obviously, mixing this strategy with the previous will lead to many dead trade ships.
• Advanced satellites help you place stations. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this then, when I did, I wasn't real impressed but maybe you'll have more luck.