Lately I have been doing passenger missions, at first with a Python which unfortunately wasn't as adept at long range missions as I thought.
I did a mission to the center of the Galaxy with it, first time I really got far from the bubble, but while it was extremely long (at 25 ly it took at least 1500 jumps to come and go from my destination which was at a whopping 25.000 light years from my home base of 9 Ceti, it took me two weeks with two entire weekends travelling) it also got me from pathfinder to pioneer and got my nickname plastered on quite a few celestial bodies including several earth-likes and a crapton of money (I went from 148 millions to about 300).
Afterwards I finally decided to get my old Asp properly equipped for exploration, unfortunately I couldn't improve the FSD beyond what I had already done almost two years ago (I think) before running out of the difficult to get materials but I improved scanning time of my surface scanner and expanded the undersized 3A power plant to support grade A engines and thrusters properly (just in case I need to land somewhere).
Then I got rid of as much weight as I could, including for the first time my weapons (I stored the engineered ones, sold the rest) reaching a jump distance of 44 ly.
My present mission while shorter than the last one is still pretty far away (15.000 ly) but it will only take 357 jumps to get there (the Python took 800 or so for a similar distance), I'll probably never make as much money scanning stuff but it won't need me to stay entire weekends just jumping from a system to another to make it back before the mission expires.
I also bought a nameplate pack, the basic one since I only had € 2,57 on my pre-paid card and didn't want to risk spending all of it on decorated nameplates I might not have liked.