Freelancer doesn't have a tutorial in the traditional sense. There's a brief intro mission that teaches you the controls. After that, you're in Manhattan with some credits and a Light Fighter, and the game trusts you to figure out the rest.
But the early trade routes are a tutorial. The game just doesn't tell you that.
Take the standard Liberty trade circuit — consumer goods out of Manhattan, ore or luxury items from Colorado or California, back to New York for a profit. On paper, it's a money-making exercise. In practice, it teaches you everything about how Sirius works.
The trade lanes take you through Liberty space at a pace that lets you see it. You pass police checkpoints. You see the corporate station signage. You fly through mining fields and understand what's being extracted and where it goes. The Lane Hackers that interdict you on the Colorado routes aren't random — they specifically target Ageira's trade infrastructure, which you'd know if you'd talked to the bartenders. The route is showing you the faction conflict before the campaign makes it explicit.
Then you extend the circuit into Bretonia. The geography changes. The police behavior changes. The goods change. Leeds is industrial and rough; Cambridge is research-focused and cleaner. The route is teaching you how Bretonian society works by making you trade through it.
This is not accidental. Freelancer's systems are designed so that doing the basic economic loop naturally exposes you to the setting. The faction reputation consequences of who you pick up cargo from, the bartender rumours that flag profitable side trips, the pirate interdictions that communicate which routes are contested — it's all information delivery, dressed as gameplay.
Players who skip the trade routes to rush through the campaign are missing this. They get to the border worlds confused about why Rheinland is aggressive or why the Corsairs are where they are, because they didn't let the trade routes explain it at walking pace.
The universe guide is here if you want it in compressed form. But flying the routes is the better version.