Most of my favourite lyrics come from Mori Calliope, aka Demondice, aka Karen Callani. I know the bounty asked for only one lyric, but I can't help myself, there's just too many good lyrics to choose, so here are some of them. There are some lyrics I would like to include, but since they contain a bit of bad language, I opted to omit them.

Cursed Night

The days are blending together

Pretending like I don't notice

Drowning in mental fog so thick my hands might close where my throat is

The song starts off with this banger. This is exactly how I feel sometimes. Feels like the days are flying by and blending together. I like to pretend like I'm present in the moment but I'm just not. And the mental fog really feels like it will drown me. I don't know how this started, but I know it can't stay like this.

"Sayonara" to the sorrow of eternity alone?

Ya, right.

Part of the joke is that it's all that I've known

As much as I don't like to admit it, I desperately want to stop being alone, but the irony is that I've always been alone and I'm honestly afraid of actually having someone. To the point that I end up sabotaging myself and I never manage to get in a relationship. Feels like an eternal sorrow.

There's more of this song I would like to include, but it would make my submission way too big, there's some bad language in it and also it would be kind of redundant, so let's move on.

Dance Past Midnight

But "time" exists, don't know where it ran

Never enough for what I'm plan, plan, planning

I get tired, and I end up sleeping all day

I'm hardwired to be motivated halfway

There's so much stress I can't convey

Just do my best with the role I play

Okay, I have to stop here before I write down the entire song. I really, really love this song and its lyrics. I don't think any explanation is required, it just resonates deeply within me. It's a portrait of my heart. I highly recommend you listen to it.

Six Feet Under

This is the penultimate one, just for the sake of keeping this submission as short as I can make it.

Now feels like I'm singing six feet underground

This heart is beating without any sound

There are no second chances for me

Nobody's likely to come back around

Upon the ashes of what once grew here

I'll plant a seed and depart by nightfall

Was I the hero no one believed?

Was I the villain after all?

This is my favourite part of the song (which also happens to be the chorus). Something happened between me and a girl I liked and this part of the song pierced through my heart at the time, because it reflected exactly what I was feeling. There's no second chances in life. Once you screw up, it's game over. No restarting. When you screw up like this, you can feel like a villain - especially when the other person is actively trying to make you feel like a villain. But was I actually the hero no one believed in? I don't actually know. Of course, I really love the entire song, but this part in particular is very special to me.

Wish I Said

This one is not by Mori Calliope, but rather by Akuma Nihmune, who is my other favourite singer. I'm absolutely obsessed with most of her music currently, but for this submission I've chosen to share this one specifically.

Always was way too scared

Way too scared to face you

Face me

Help me

Help me

Let me pay for all my sins

Cowards don't deserve this love

This... just... ouch. It hurts, but in a healing way. That's me right there. This makes me want to actually try, to actually go and face my fears, especially my fear of rejection. I can't be a coward forever. I need to pay for my sins.

Wish I said hi to you 'fore you left

Now my world feels so cold

I wanna go back to you

Wish I spent some time with you 'fore you left

Now I feel down

I wanna go back to you

Again, I don't think an explanation is required. That's just how I feel whenever I fumble a girl. Or rather how I feel when I don't even try.

Well, that's it. I poured my heart on this submission. It's not about the bounty, it's about screaming my heart out and finally getting rid of this weight. I hope you enjoyed and I hope you check out these amazing artists. There's much more I'd like to share, but this will have to do for now.

Now that's something I can talk about! I've been bounty hunting since my very first day in Elite, so it's time to guide the little ones in the same trail I blazed.

When you start the game, you will find yourself inside the cockpit of a sidewinder. It may not be an Anaconda, but if you use it right, you can bring down even the mightiest of pirate (edge)lords.

Weapons

The sidewinder only has 2 weapon slots, so there's few options to choose from. You could go for a double laser, which will take the shields down very quick but take longer to chew through the hull, with the advantage of not requiring ammo, so you can keep fighting until you either get tired or your hull gets too low for your liking. You could also go for a double multicannon, which will take much longer to get through the shields, but once they're down it will chew through the hull rather quickly, with the disadvantage of requiring ammo, so you'll have to abandon the fight earlier than you might expect. You could also get both a laser and a multicannon, which combines the advantages of both weapons but once the ammo runs out you will have only one laser to defend yourself with. You could also choose other weapons, like the plain cannons or the fragment cannons instead of the multicannons, for example, both of which do huge damage and I actually recommend them more than the multicannons. Or you could go fancy and try using more exotic weapons like railguns, plasma cannons, missiles, torpedoes, etc, but those will consume a TON of your ship's power, will heat up your ship super quickly and will be very expensive to reload. That and the fact that railguns, torpedoes, mines and plasma cannons are only offered in the fixed variant, which I really don't recommend to beginners. And that brings me to the variants of each weapon. Most weapons come in 3 variants: fixed, gimballed and turret. I highly recommend you use gimballed weapons as a beginner, as they can move on their own to give you an aim assist. Fixed weapons deal more damage than their gimballed counterparts, but are much harder to aim. Turreted weapons are not recommended at all for beginners since they offer the least amount of damage and are completely automatic. The only advantage of turrets is they can shoot behind you and aim at places you wouldn't be able to aim at with gimballed weapons. Besides the 3 variants of weapon mobility, there are also 3 different kinds of laser weapons; those being the pulse, burst and beam lasers. Pulse lasers drain less power from your ship but also deal less damage. As the name suggests, they fire in pulses. Burst lasers drain more power but also deal more damage and fire in bursts of 3. I think you can already anticipate what the beam lasers do. They do the most amount of damage while consuming the most amount of power from your ship, and they fire continuously in a beam.

Outfitting

You're definitely gonna need a shield, because you don't want your beautiful sidewinder to be melted in seconds. Normal shields are good, but bi-weave shields are better. They're a bit weaker than their normal counterparts, but they regenerate much faster. Prismatic shields are not only extremely slow to regenerate despite being extremely strong, but they're also locked behind powerplay, and if you're a beginner then you haven't done powerplay yet, so don't worry about prismatics. You're not even gonna need them against NPCs. Besides that, I recommend some hull and module reinforcements, and also some cargo racks because you never know when you might need them. Don't fuss about other modules and definitely don't buy different hulls (reinforced alloys, military alloys, etc), they're gonna cost you the same it cost you to buy your entire ship, sometimes even more!

Stations

You could definitely start bounty hunting where you are, but if you want certain modules and ships, you're gonna be hopping around the bubble to find them. That's why people recommend Ray Gateway at Diaguandri as a good station for bounty hunters, because they have most of the modules and ships you're gonna need for this career. I personally live in I Sola Prospect at Brestla, because it has all the modules and ships in the game, with the disadvantage that they cost more than normal.

Ships

As a beginner, once you've earned enough cash in your sidewinder, you can buy a new ship. These are a few of the ships you could buy:

• Eagle: basically a glorified sidewinder with wings. Very fast, but packs about the same punch as a sidey. I keep one in my garage more as a decoration than an actual fighter, but, just like the sidey, it could become very deadly in the right hands.

• Cobra MK3: the dearest of the older Elite players, the same ship CMDR Jameson piloted. It's very good at everything, not just combat, and is basically a bigger version of the sidewinder. Very good, I recommend.

• Viper MK3: this is my dearest ship. If I could marry a spaceship it would be the Viper MK3. It looks fantastic, is very quick and packs a punch. It can even be outfitted to be the fastest ship in the game, at about 950 m/s if I remember correctly. Definitely give it a try.

• Viper MK4: I've never actually bought a Viper MK4, so I can't tell you if it's good or not. I've seen people saying it's bad and others saying it's good, so give it a try if you can. You might be surprised. According to the in-game specifications, it has a stronger hull but is also heavier and slower than the MK3. Aesthetically it reminds me of the Rangers from Interstellar.

• Adder: this is gonna sound weird, but the Adder was actually the first ship I bought in the game. It's surprisingly very good, and, just like the Cobra MK3, it's very good at everything, not just combat. This was my first bounty hunting ship (after the sidewinder) and I also recommend it. It's very fun and unique.

• Diamondback Scout/Explorer: they're both very good for combat. The Explorer is better, but the Scout is also very good. The DBX (Diamondback Explorer) is my second favourite ship in the game, only behind the Viper MK3. I love it and I recommend it a lot.

• Vulture: also very good at combat, despite being a small ship it has 2 class 3 weapon slots, so you'll be melting your enemies very quickly... while also melting your own ship in the process. It suffers from crippling power deficiency, and it will be rare for you to see your capacitors at full charge unless you're not in combat. It is awesome though, not only it looks very cool and has amazing visibility, it also sounds awesome. Mine is called Lamborghini, lol.

Actually doing the thing

Alright, no more stalling. Let's get to the meat of this. If you want to start bounty hunting, I recommend starting at navigation beacons. Yeah, the resource extraction sites are better, but the navigation beacons are much safer for beginners and you're also not at risk of smashing into a rock. Once you drop at the nav beacon, you gotta scan the ships in the area until you find one that has the red "wanted" tag. This step is basically a press "G" simulator. Once you have the perpetrator in your scanner, get closer (and I recommend being at the back of the criminal ship, so that it doesn't fire at you right away and has to turn around to hit you) and fire away. If your shields start getting low, boost away and then come back when your shields are sufficiently regenerated. Unless the guy is getting beat up by the cops, in which case you shouldn't go too far otherwise the game won't give you the bounty. I don't know why it does that but it is what it is. Anarchy systems don't have cops, so you should be extra careful when bounty hunting at those systems. The cops are your friends, they will help take down the edgelord and you should be super careful not to hit them. If you accidentally hit them while targeting the criminal, they will just send you a message telling you to "look where you're shooting" or something like that, but if you hit them while targeting them, then the whole system will turn on you and you'll become wanted yourself. The same applies if you hit them too many times even if you're not targeting them. Once you're happy with your bounties, when your hull is too damaged or when you've run out of ammo, you can just enter supercruise and go to the nearest station, where you will repair, resupply and collect your bounties. Have fun, never fly without a rebuy (unless you really have to) and make your own mistakes so you can learn from them! I intentionally left this text very vague because, ultimately, it's you who have to decide how you want to play the game, otherwise you won't be playing, you'll just be following instructions, and that's boring. Oh, and one more thing: dont die! If you die, you lose your bounty vouchers!

Off the top of my head, the best story I can remember happening to me was when I almost ran out of fuel and hat to call the Fuel Rats. It happened when I was a very "young" CMDR. I was in my Viper Mk3, moving to another system. I did have a fuel scoop in my ship - which, by the way, is almost mandatory unless you're flying a very specific build that isn't meant to be jumping around - but I didn't pay attention to my route. What happened is that I jumped to one too many brown dwarfs and didn't have enough fuel to jump to the next system - or any system in the vicinity at all. And it was an anarchy system, so no stations either. Back then, I couldn't really afford to just self destruct, so I had to call the fuel rats. Don't get me wrong, it was an awesome experience, but I could have saved some headache if I paid attention to my route. So yeah, always check if there are enough scoopable stars in your route. Turn off non-scoopable ones if necessary. The scoopable star classes are: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. You can memorise it through the following phrase: "Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me". It's surprisingly effective.

Believing that Hutton Orbital is not giving away free Anacondas (trust me, they really do, you should totally go there on your first day in a sidewinder). Oh, and for the trip, I recommend installing an SCO frameshift drive in your sidewinder. Don't worry about the fuel and heat warnings, you'll be fine :P