Ask in chat to be in a reclaimer crew and the answer is a couple hours. If you really play by the gameplay loops, it all depends on what you want to grind. It takes 100 or so bounties to get to around a million credits but less for the next set as they get harder you make more money. There’s also plenty of illegal ways to make money but those have their obvious drawbacks
Haha you’re right sorry. Bounties take about 15 min or so if you’re taking your time. So 4 bounties an hour and you can easily get to the 15k+ bounties so 60k/h so like 20 hours.
Thats pretty loose numbers as well, you can make more money with A Call to Arms to make extra cash with bounties and better bounties give you up to 70k (but starter ships can’t really do those hence not being included in my math).
You can get the money faster salvaging currently. Vulture can be rented in game and scraping a ship will net you ~$100k a run and cost about 30 min of time.
This means about every 15-20 hours of normal gameplay can net you 1-1.5 million with HRTs and a light fighter. There are many other ways to make money faster, but this is the fastest established gameplay loop (not salvage). Most ships are 3 million or less credits with ground vehicles being 750k or less. You absolutely do not need to spend real money on ships.
If you play a few hours a day for a week you’ll have enough money for a ship. Worst case you can literally just say you’re new and ask for money in chat, people are very generous and welcoming on SC. The Reclaimer is making me about $2.5mil an hour sharing profit with my box boy lol.