Hi all, nice to see so many Star Control fans in one place Being lazy and unwilling to spend a lot of time on boring mining, I decided to take another (though somewhat unfair) approach. Right after I got into the Sol system, I got to Pluto, picked up Fwiffo and got back to Hyperspace. Since there's a 100% chance of a Slylandro Probe appearing at this point of the game, I got a lot of kills - Eluder can take out the computer-controlled Probe without much effort. For two game months, it's possible to accumulate 11,000 credits or something like
Another thing was funnier (Har! Har! Har!), I think I found a bug in UQM 0.6. That's the sequence of what I was doing. First, I picked up Fwiffo at Pluto, losing 8 crew in the process. Then, I transwerred 29 crew to Fwiffo's ship, having 13 crew remaining at the Flagship. Then I got to HyperSpace, fought some Slylandro and eventually lost some crew on Fwiffo's ship. After the battle, I transferred some more crew to Fwiffo's ship. Then the next Probe arrived... and when I got to ship choice screen, there was again 13 crew on the Flagship!
I tried this trick several times, and it actually works - the crew number always remains constant, no matter how much crew you transfer to the Eluder. Constant is the word which means that you can't get it working the other way around - transferring crew from Eluder or Cruiser to the Flagship before the next battle against a Probe means that you'll just lose your crew, ending up with the same 13 crew members on the Flagship and decreased number on Eluder/Cruiser.
I didn't experiment with some other possibilities - like getting to Hyperspace with 42 crew and only then transfer 29 crew to Fwiffo's ship and see what happens, or fighting Probe with a Cruiser, getting some damage and patching it up the same way I patched Fwiffo's ship - I'm not sure if I can take out a Probe with a Cruiser.