Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24440536-20150516114626/@comment-25467429-20150520225807

Is your concern time, or fuel? If you're limited on fuel, then like everyone has said, you'll have to spend a lot of time waiting, almost two months, averaging around 15k to 20k a mission, spending little to nothing on anything else to keep your earnings maximized. It wouldn't be a terribly good idea to use any contracts unless you can do a lot of missions in the 12-hour active period, otherwise you're mostly putting them to waste. Even at 20k a mission, that's 200 sorties, which at 3 or 4 a day would be 50 to 67 days.

If your concern is time, and you're not worried about fuel, find a day during a future Forced Sortie event (I don't think there's been a weekend they haven't done one), and used Forced Sorties in a marathon session or two (two - four hour sessions with a break inbetween sessions). With the multiplier, you will never earn as much money through Forced Sorties as you do through regular missions. Example, if you do three missions and earn 15k each, then your total is 45k for those three used fuel units. If you used up those same 3 units on just one forced sortie, you net 52.5k, or 7500 more. It's a relatively small sum but do it twice and that's already a single mission extra income for the same amount of fuel. Add both Elite Merc and Plant Invest contracts and you can push your per mission income to anywhere from 30k to 45k, or more. At 45k using single fuel sorties, you get 135k, or using a forced sortie you get 157.5k. This forced sortie route takes 25 sorties or so, which would be significantly less total fuel at only 75 units (instead of 200). Again, this all assumes fuel isn't an issue as you would need to use much of this fuel at once, so you couldn't wait on supplied fuel much unless you strategically space it out over active Forced sortie days. You could do it in as little as a day, or have to stretch it out over a few weekends.

My last recomendation - make sure you do the in-course challenges. Stuff that gets you fuel, the one for the elite merc contract, stuff like that, and try to log in each day, even if you ultimately don't fly a sortie, to go for the sign-in bonuses. They get you a little bit of money or useful items along the way and can keep you from getting too bored.