Is there a "quick" way to newly engineer?

[Paragon]

Title. I quit the game before engineers due to a lack of time, and honestly i'm not seeing much of a window to return with their implementation, among other things. I was told online that engineers are OP compared to normal stuff (50% less heat AND more 30% damage? Jesus).

Is there a quicker way to setup some decent stuff? How long does it take? I would like to engineer a Vulture right now as it was my go-to for bounty hunting way back when. I could also engineer an FAS or FDL, two ships I also liked.

I don't know what the current meta is or anything about the ayylamos and their guns and crap. Back in my day we stacked shield cell banks like total cheeseballs because they generated no heat and we liked it!

[Tokfan]

First head over to;
https://inara.cz/galaxy-engineers/
Ther you can see the flow chart which engineer unlock after which and if you click on them it will tell you what they need.
I highly suggest you go for Martuuk first, then your choice between the rest. In the end you'll want them all to be unlocked and at rank 5. Well there's the Colonia ones but let's skip those for now.
Some engineers double up on upgrades say Martuuk & Felicity both does FSD drives, you want them both anyways since you can pin recipes to do remote engineering and it's a long way to unlock Palin.

Ok, with that out of the way let's talk about the estimated time needed to unlock all of the "bubble" ones, we're looking at around 15 hours maybe less if you get lucky with system states that sells the rare commodities some of the engineers want and days if the system state is bad.
But around 15 solid hours is a good estimate.

So there's a few shortcuts worth mentioning;
For any that needs permits; Head over to https://www.spansh.co.uk/riches and follow that route for roughly 45 minutes and sell those discoveries at a station which have the faction you want the permit from.

For the mining one; you don't need to sell the stuff you mine, just get credit for the refining process so feel free to dump everything but 10 tonnes of Painite into space.

The most time consuming is Lei Cheung (and palin) with his requirement of trading at 50 stations, so everywhere you dock make sure to buy and sell an unit of liquid hydrogen or something really cheap.

For travelling around the place I'd recommend a DBX or preferably an AspX (due to the cargo cap) since you will be jumping all over the place and the asp for hauling the 200 ton of gold faster.

I'd spend a good 4-5 hours just following the road to riches and racking up data first.
Don't sell more than you need, quite a few engineers will accept exploration data and their rank will increase so sell a few systems at a time and don't go for one page at a time. Usually you'll have to relog to see the updated reputation/rank.

When leaving an engineer, pin a recipe!

Allright, now to actually getting a ship up to snuff;
There's a few spots around the place that is super good to know about;
Material Brokers to barter one material for another ( https://inara.cz/galaxy-nearest/25/ ) - punch in your system there, unless you visited them before they won't show up on the galaxy map.
Material brokers is the express way to get your proper stuff!

Instead of farting around on a planet or mining a ring for materials grab that jump ship of yours and head to "the bug killer" https://canonn.science/codex/bug-killer-crashed-anaconda/
There you'll find 3 boxes and 3 beacons. Shoot the boxes, scoop everything up and scan the beacons.
After about half an hour you are filled up with "worthless" data & raw material, so head over to the brokers and get what you want, don't worry about "wasting" materials by cross trading or exchanging more than you need, the bug killer will always be there.

For manufactured materials there's three ways;
Either you take use of the new system scanner (FSS) and head to the correct systems* and go for high-grade USS - no more travelling at random THIS is a super time saver. Head to the brokers and downgrade as needed.

Or you can go to Dav's hope and get a ton of low-mid tier materials, kinda obsolete now but still a good place to go to get a ton of different materials which is good for when you are just starting out. https://canonn.science/codex/davs-hope/

Or you go to a nav beacon/rez extract and shoot ships ( hint: look up "healies 4 feelies" on youtube but for that you need a buddy ).

*As for where to go for specific signal sources;
Imperial shielding - Empire, Core dynamics - Federal, Proto Light - can't remember, Proto radiolic/heat - anarcy, Improvised - Unrest, Pharmaceutical Isolators - Outbreak.
Special note for Pharmas; If you find an outbreak system in Anarchy you are golden! Grab a ship that can spank T-9's and scoop up what they drop, usually chemical manipulators (useful stuff) but not too uncommon Pharma isolators. And they respawn "kinda" fast.
When going there you could bring a wake scanner and scan some wakes while waiting for respawns but I wouldn't bother. The bug killer is so much faster it's just silly.

And if the only thing you want is data, then there's no place as Jameson's Cobra. (https://canonn.science/codex/cmdr-john-jameson-crashed-cobra-mkiii/ )10 minutes is all you need to fill up and able to get 16 of ANY grade 5 data.

Whatever you choose to do first it's up to you. But make sure you go to either martuuk or felicity with either explorer ship and upgrade that FSD to long range ASAP.

And btw, experimental effects are no longer random so pick and choose whichever you want.
You can't put an experimental remotely, but you can put an experimental on a grade 1 and keep it while upgrading it remotely all the way to grade 5.

Two last things to keep in mind that may or may not get irritating;
-Remote engineering does NOT increase the rank of the engineer so until they are rank 5 do the engineering on site unless you are lazy.

-If you have a recipe pinned, say increased FSD drive range for example and you go to Martuuk/Farseer and upgrade it a bit the game will say you have the recipe still pinned but you DO NOT (!!) after entering super cruise or relog the recipe will magically unpin itself, so if you ever go to an engineer and do an upgrade for something you have pinned, relog and pin it again.

As for the meta I couldn't really tell you, resistance is two steps above OP when it comes to PVE, couple that with efficient thermal vent beam lasers and you be in a CNAV forever.

Edit: Why would you ever want the Colonia ones?
Well, take a look at Selene Jean for example, you can only pin armor OR hull reinforcement packs but Petra Olmanova will let you be able to pin BOTH. Granted the Colonia is maxxes out at rank 3 at the time I'm writing this, but about 2 months ago they were capped at rank 1, so in a few months it's going to be really handy to go out there and pin some conflicting recipes like armor & hull armor, multi cannons & rails etc.

Yeah I know the first link to Inra says "G1" on all the colonia ones, but I recently came back from there, they're all G3 now due to "development due to the community" or some crap like that. So unless you want to do the trip multiple times wait for them to reach rank 5, until then feel free to use the Inra page as a "G1 oh that's colonia, screw that, next one". :)

Edit 2: (final edit)
For easy unlocking Prof Palin with his "insane" requirement of 5k Ly travelled. Grab your explorer ship, rip everything out but a fuel scoop. slam in a few AFMUs and head over to https://www.spansh.co.uk/plotter
Aim for a random system 5k away and off you go.

And exploding your ship is a valid option to get back from your 5k trip/Colonia really fast. - Just make sure to buy a crap sidewinder in colonia and choose the starting ship... but you can forget about getting whatever ship you traveled there with though, gonna be expensive as all heck to get it back.

[Paragon]

Holy ♥♥♥♥♥ I was kinda sad I only got on comment but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is like 10 in one go.

I went through the entire thing and yeah my bad. ED wasn't ever really "quick", and any spare time I have I would rather spend bounty hunting like I did in the past.

It sounds as you need a good 10 hours just to get your foot in the door, much less get anything good.

[Tokfan]

Well you spend some time setting up the engineers so that later you can do the next engineering in no time.
After unlocking them all and ranking them up it's extremely fast with lots of ways to speed things up compared to how it used to be.
No more sitting for hours in super cruise looking for high grade USS, no more jumping a combat ship to Maia to upgrade it, no more farting around randomly on planet surfaces looking for material X, no more pure randomness on the rolls, no more fish needed to roll, and each material has their own storage, so no more filling up your whole material quota with low grade stuff you have to delete.

Yeah, it's a lot, LOT easier now.
Sure you can't get a G5 with a single roll but or fit a size 5 shield on a cutter any more, but the end result is less time needed to get your ship done, engineering v. 3 is a breeze.