Didi Vatermann
Trade rank of merchant and 50 units of Lavian brandy, Merchant is a bit tougher, requires about 3,700,000 of credits earned from trade, I recommend you hit up [the trade helper](https://roguey.co.uk/elite-dangerous/trade-helper/best/) and get as big a hauling vessle as you can, eddb works fine too if you know what to look for. The Lavian brandy is not bad, it’s 1 short jump from Didi (the Lave system) so even with low allocation, it won’t take long. Didi is worth it though, G5 shield boosters are GREAT (though are being nurfed some in 2.3).
Professor Palin
Travel 5,000 LY from your home (sucks if you’re not an explorer, but not too bad) and provide 25 unknown fragments (extremely easy). For the 5,000 LY, just pick up a (or several) long range sightseeing mission to somewhere ~6000 ly away (Black Treasure is a great choice). For the 25 unknown fragments, use [EDBearing](http://hotdoy.ca/ed/bearing/) to go to one of the alien wreckages, get in your SRV, shoot the unknown artifact, and collect its fragments, relog and repeat until you have 25 (2-3 relogs should be all you need, remember each fragment you pick up gives you 3 in your material storage). Palin gives a few upgrades, most useful is the much heralded G5 Dirty drives.
Broo
Combat Competent and 50 units of Fujin tea. Two somewhat requirements here. Combat competent has no real “fast path”, you need to kill ships to get this, no bones about it. I recommend you go to places where high rank ships are common (HazRez, Compromised nav beacons, High conflict zones) and fight in a wing (as XP for combat rank is not divided, so focusing fire is good for building rank). Fujin tea is the real killer here, often, its allocation is 5T and Fujin is 154LY from Muang. I recommend you keep an eye on Fujin to see if it goes into boom (when allocation is highest, around 15), grab a friend, and load up. He is worth it though if you want to shoot lasers, as G5 efficient (or G5 long range if you’re not in a fast ship) are both GREAT mods for lasers. Mix that with nice special effects like regen sequence, concordinate sequence, emissive, and scramble spectrum and your lasers will be great.
Bill Turner
Get friendly with the Alliance and provide 50 Bromellite. First, he lives in Alioth, so you need to get a permit to get to his system, go bounty hunt in Alcor if you don’t feel like doing missions and turn in the bounties to “Fast Landing” in Alcor. The Rominger Dock in 78 Ursae Majoris is where i had my best luck getting the Permits to drop though. Bromellite is easiest to get from Pristine ice rings (and much more common than Painite). [EIC](https://discord.gg/s3jhUsy) and [TLC](https://discord.gg/UtccPnB) sell Bromellite too. Most useful blueprint is G5 Plasma Accelerators.
Ram Tah
Exploration Surveyor and 50 classified scan databanks. Surveyor is easy, just do some passenger missions and you’re done, 50 CSDs are a bit tougher. I recommend you just take them as they come and don’t mine them specifically, just every time you see a trade ship, select and scan it. You can also get them from surface POIs but those are fairly hard to farm due to their 1 week reset time. He has a few nice optimization mods, like lightweight heatsinks (and other utilities), and, fantastically, high ammo heatsinks.
Tiana Fortune
Get friendly with with the Empire and provide 50 Decoded emission data, both are easy. Just doing empire missions for rank will get you friendly fast (Quince is good), and decoded emission data you get by looking at unscanned combat ships (and scanning them, requires no special module, the same thing you do to see if the target is wanted, you probably already have 50 if you have done bounty hunting a lot and didn’t throw these away as i suggested at the beginning). No really special blueprints though, lots of lightweight mods for things that are fairly pointless to be lightweight (though lightweight fuel transfer limpet controller would be good for the fuel rats out there).
Colonal Bris Dekker
Friendly with the feds, and 10,000,000CR of combat bonds. Before you start, Bris is in SOL, so if you don’t have your sol permit from fed rank (do donation missions at 17 drac if you need lots of fed rank and have some spare $$), go do that first, that will also likely get you friendly with the feds. The 10mCR in combat bonds is tough, basically, you need to spend an entire weekend farming CZs (do this with friends, will be much easier even when sharing the combat bonds), to get 10m in bonds. The tough part is doing that without dying. Luckily, at this point, you should have a fairly well engineered combat ship and be hard to kill. Bris has good FSD interdictor mods (expanded capture arc is incredible IMO).
The Sarge
Midshipman with fed navy and 50 aberrant shield pattern analysis. Super easy stuff, if you have the SOL permit, you are 1 rank beyond midshipman, and 50 aberrant shield pattern analysis is easy if you do combat (scanning combat ships). Gives G5 cannon upgrades (OC your cannons, and you will be in love). Also has limpet mods.
Lori Jameson
Dangerous combat, 25 units of kongga ale, and a nice fat trap (her base is in the Permit locked founders world system of SHINRARTA DEZHRA, meaning you need to get elite in something to even consider unlocking Lori. For the permit, there are a dozen ways to get elite. Elite exploration is probably easiest (passenger missions, though that may change with 2.3). Elite trade is a slow slog with anything shy of a Cutter. And Elite combat will take an insane amount of time. Dangerous combat, see Broo for how to get this, it will take a while. 25 kongga ale was reasonably easy, it’s a long trip, but the allocation was 15-24 form all the reports I have heard/my experience so only 2 trips.
And that concludes all the engineers!
Simbad 