As Privateer players know, the missions that shell out the biggest amount of cash are the bounty hunting ones (over 10K credits easily) but are pretty taxing ones since they involve searching for your prey all over space with no clear indication as to where it is.
Now, the trick with bounty hunting missions is that the target always spawns on one of the navpoints of the system you took the mission in or on a system directly adjacent to that one. On practically every system this means pure madness, since you have to check out every navpoint on junction and all adjacent systems until you get lucky. Fortunately for us, there's a hole in that theory.
What to do? Go to Padre system on the Humbolt quadrant which has only 2 navpoints, one a pleasure planet and the other a single exit to system 119CE which in turn has only 4 navpoints. Once in the pleasure planet, just take the bounty hunter missions over and over and instead of flying through dozens of nav-points on patrol duty or escort missions you'll just have to hit a couple of navs to fight a single space craft (40% of the time the target spawned on the pleasure planet itself, meaning you just took off, shoot him down, and landed for over 10K).
It doesn't get any easier than that. That's how I got myself a fully armed Centurion in no time. And it's not even a cheat!!