Well I haven't posted for a while so I'll try to catch up quick. I've completed my grind to Rear Admiral, and flew back to the bubble to purchase the Corvette for a 15% discount.
I then headed over to the Imperial part of space and started to grind out my Imperial ranks. I made it all the way to 100% Marquis. But I didn't get the the navy mission to reach Duke. My goal here was to purchase the Imperial Cutter. But after all the donation missions in the Imperial grind I don't have enough money to purchase the Cutter. I headed back across the bubble and out into space to reach Caos and Sothis. And here I am, grinding out money.

I was just promoted to Post Commander tonight. I've been grinding federal rank in the sothis and ceos systems. The two system have data missions that fly back and forth over and over.... GRIND :( My federal mission was to take out 8 pirates. They were kind of hard to fine. I got my first two by interdiction, but that was taking for ever, so I went to the ring planet and found an extraction zone. There the pirates showed up a little faster than just flying around. I also turned in 1.6m in bounties. Well back to grinding. 14% Post Commander.

Last night I arrived back in the bubble from my first long range run to the Eagle nebula and back.

It was an interesting run, I learned a lot. The biggest was my Anaconda is not setup right. I need to put some modifications on my FSD.
Using the newton highway remove the boardom of jumping from system to system. Each newtron jump you need to manually plot your next jump.
I scanned each system just before jumping out, and stopped to get detailed scans of all the planets in a couple of system.

I also enjoyed opening up my multi-crew, people jumped in and out along my flight. I got to talk and meet new people, most never seen newtron star jumping before, so it was cool teaching them my technique. However, one guy schooled me. He came in and gave me some good info on how to manage your ship on these long range runs. That's where I figured out my ship was not kitted out right. He was surprised to see me out so far with out an modifications on my systems, especially the FSD.

He also gave me a scare. He asked if i'd like to see something cool because we were pretty close. Of course I said yes. So we jumped to the system he was telling me. I could see it coming, it was a little blue nebula, I've seen them before so no big deal. However, when I jumped into this system it also contained a black hole that knocked me out of FSD then the guys said "HaHa got you". Me and my other multi-crew guy was scared we just got "had" and I was going to loose my ship. I tried to jump back into supercruse but couldn't find the escape vector and couldn't take the heat it was generating. So this guy told me how to shutdown all the nonessential systems to get into supercruse. He also gave me some other pointers, and then he was on his way. After he left we flew around the black hole a few times and went to look at one LARGE planet in the system. It was pretty cool, it had huge fisheres running from pole to pole. You could tell the fishers was caused by the gravitational pull that was squeezing the entire planet from the black-hole. The Planet itself was also huge, it took considerable time to pull away from it's gravitational pull