>>One very important tip: DO NOT BUY DRIVER COIL.
>>
>
>I'd not heard this one before. Can you expand on why?

It's not actively harmful in and of itself, but there's really no conceivable situation where its benefits are better than almost any other choice there. If you're a glass cannon type, you'd want to buy it over the threat-boosting abilities because the last thing you want is to get hit more, but even in that case you'd probably get more mileage out of buying red ranks in weapon skills than green ranks of Driver Coil.

This is what Driver Coil does:

- Increases your turn warp speed and turn rate in sector space (and the increment it provides to warp speed is miniscule, and getting a higher-quality warp core/singularity core gets you a much greater benefit without sucking up skill points).
- Increases in-system speed and turn rate only at full impulse (i.e. not the maximum impulse in-combat).
- Reduces draw on other systems when at full impulse.

The latter one is the only one that might be of tangible benefit, and, even then, I already tend to drop out of full impulse before I get into combat. It's purely convenience, and a tiny one, and a halfway decent impulse engine does that and moreso. It's not actively bad, it's just an utter waste of points.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding