I recently read a post by Mcneilsmith9 on the best way to rank up within the Federal Navy, and decided to try it out (Sol system, taking high rep missions from the 4 stations near Earth). It's been 5 days and I went from Petty Officer to Rear Admiral.
I only took assassination missions that offered Rep+3 and higher, avoided ones that went to Alpha Centauri (in case it placed a mission target near Hutton Orbital), as well as the occasional donation mission.
I'm not that good at the game and even though I have a near fully engineered krait mk2 for pve, I used to struggle with taking on engineered NPC Fer-de-Lances in wings of 2 or greater. That's until I realized you can just ram them to death.
If you follow closely behind and boost into them, they won't have time to react and you'll do a decent amount of damage to their shields and hull. Best part? They won't become hostile. Once you've rammed them enough to make them try to jump away, start firing on them and they will stop charging their fsd but still won't engage you.
For non wing assassination missions, just let them come to you and interdict you. Can easily jump a rank with one to two runs of 15ish missions each and it only takes about an hour and a half a run.
Safe flying cmdrs o7
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/zaccoi/tips_on_the_federal_navy_rank_grind/
