Target pirates. target all the pirates, if its hostile to you already and you see it fly by, blow it up. if you outrange them their lack of shields or inefficient shielding will make them crumble away to you. focusing down the pirates in corvus does actually give you enough resources to command a fleet of whatever ships you want. the big thing in uomoz is that supplies are rarely dropped in combat, what is dropped are little bits of ship parts like flux conduits and what not, you can sell these at the trade post station. you probably noticed you can't trade with any other station unless you join their faction. but you can still trade with the neutrals so look for their grey stations they have one in basically every system. the other thing your going to get in combat is blueprints these are vital to turning a tidy profit if you plan on going it alone.
When you save up a little money from killing pirates and selling off their ship parts at the neutral station you should have an option that goes something like " purchase docking rights and autofactory use, 5000 credits" this allows you to identify these blueprints and they'll show you how to make ships, the important thing is you can also sell them which is important because you WILL get duplicates. the other option rather than selling them is to trade them with a bit of credits to the independants for a random one, this is okay early on to get more patterns but keep in mind if you trade in a frigate blueprint you will only ever get a frigate blueprint same goes for each class so once you have most or all of the blueprints for a class your better off selling the duplicates. primarily because the new blueprint you get from the trade CAN'T be sold or re traded meaning you'll end up with lots of duplicates that are entirely useless. What is also important is the blueprints you get are limited to what you fight, if you go after only buffalos all day guarded by one or two frigates your only going to get low tech pirate destroyers and frigates. this isn't too bad because you can get cerberus, foxhounds, hounds, lashers, enforcers that way but you'll eventually have to move onto bigger game, such as cruisers and capitals. a single capital blueprint can be worth quite a lot of credits.
the way i do it is to go with a frigate fleet supported by one or two destroyers, when you get to the big time ( versus other factions than pirates with proper capital ships) thats the only time you should escalate your fleet up to cruisers and capitals. that said it also comes down to your skills as well as your character skills, if you invest heavily in Tech your fleet is less likely to screw up and die on you in stupid ways, i say less likely because you'll always have that stupid pilot that decides he needs to sit next to the cruiser that has 10 hp left and is on fire. the reason for this is because skills in tech ( minus gunnery) benefit your entire fleet not just your own ship, be it extra armor, extra OP, extra speed, extra flux vent and flux capacity and Tech contains the most hullmod unlocks as well which obviously contribute their own benefits to your whole fleet.
If you have the piloting skills yourself to stay alive through most situations than combat skills may be where you want to invest instead, because those skills benefit you and only you ( with a few exceptions such as hullmod unlocks and the lvl 10 optimized assembly)
so overall you need to decide if you want to go it alone or go it with a fleet backing you up and then if you want to keep the power focused on you or distribute it among the fleet, if you go with the fleet option i also recommend putting skills into leadership because you'll always want to grow your fleet.
As for that powered down station in my opinion it should be left alone until your ready for it, what it does is make every single faction your enemy, however it turns you into the leader of your own faction and your fleets will be comprised of any ships you have the blueprint unlocked for. but if you don't have decent ships for your fleets to use such as capitals and cruisers they will be the joke of the sector as the other factions just roll over them and then you and then you'll be stuck in a repeated death spiral unless your really good at piloting because there is no way to undo the faction changes short of reloading a save from before you activate the station.