Making Money With Hyper-coils
Early game money is one of the more difficult challenges in Cosmoteer's Career mode. Turning copper into hyper-coils is an easy, effective, and lucrative way of topping up your bank account early on.
Logic
This strategy revolves around hyper-coils being incredibly easy and cheap to manufacture, requiring only copper. Hyper-coils sell for 
150 each, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's easy to get massive amounts of them in even short mining trips.
For example, the first copper asteroid I found contained 31 units of copper. This copper refines 1:1 into 31 coils, and then again at a 2:1 ratio into 15 hyper-coils. I can then sell those hyper-coils for a profit of 2,250 credits. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's just a single asteroid that the crew can mine within seconds. That total quickly racks up if you spend time clearing an asteroid field or circling the entire system belt.
Prerequisites
To start, you'll need to purchase some Blueprints from a station, specifically the Steel Smelter, Coil Factory, and Hyper-Coil Factory. We won't use the Steel Smelter, but it's needed to unlock the coil factories. The combined cost of these blueprints is 55,000, so you'll need to do some missions, mining, or salvaging to get the upfront cash.
Building A Mining Ship
Your first mining ship can be as simple or complex as you like, though you'll likely need to keep your design as simple as possible to save money. The factories themselves can prove expensive to build since they need processors and hyper-coils, and you'll still need the usual necessities like reactors and a command block. I'd recommend adding a Mining Laser for extra speed and to get more copper, but it's not a hard requirement. You'll also need Storage Bays to store the copper and resulting products. You can technically get by with the 2×2 bay, though the more storage you can add, the better.
The ship featured on the right is one that I quickly put together, which includes all the basics, a 4×4 storage bay, and a mining laser. Though not the prettiest or most efficient design, it's enough to get started. It also lacks defenses, meaning we'll need to run at the first sign of trouble.
Finding Asteroids
The next step is to find copper asteroids to mine. Fortunately, copper is abundant, and you'll find plenty in both asteroid field points of interest and the asteroid belt surrounding every system. You'll find these asteroids marked with 'Cu' — the chemical symbol for copper.
Mining Asteroids
Now it's time to mine some copper. Select your ship, press the 'Gather' key ('G' by default), and left-click and drag over the entire asteroid. Doing this marks all the copper inside for gathering by your crew.
Some copper will be close enough to the surface that the crew can mine it directly, while other deposits are too deep into the rock and require a mining laser to excavate.
Processing Copper
Once the copper has been gathered and deposited into your ship, your crew members will refine it. They will first process the copper into Coils, then use those to make hyper-coils. The entire production chain is automated, and the crew will transport resources as needed without input. More advanced users may want to use the Resource Manager for more fine-tuned control of where products get deposited into storage.
Selling Hyper-Coils
Now that you have your Hyper-Coils, the last step is finding a station and selling them. Most stations have significant storage, so even the closest station will likely be able to buy most — if not all — of your stock.
Scaling Up
It's worth making some improvements to your craft with your initial profit. If you haven't already got a Mining Laser, now is the time to add one. Another worthwhile investment is hiring as many crew members as your fame allows, as this directly influences how fast you can get through an asteroid. More storage is always worth it as you can hold more Hyper-Coils between selling trips. If you have the cash and power to spare, a Sensor Array is handy since it will let you see both asteroids and enemies further away.
One of the beautiful things about mining is the snowball effect. You can invest the money you make back into improving your ship, allowing you to mine more copper, mine it faster, and store more Hyper-Coils per trip. Repeat this process as much as you want until you have built the ultimate mining craft capable of tearing through an entire belt in moments.
You can add all the other factory types when you have enough money, allowing you to process every resource you see. Processors, Enriched Uranium, and Diamonds are all very lucrative and worth expanding into.