Thanks a lot guys.
1 thing I'm unclear on. The gear I get from completing Corellia/Illum is that good enough for Makeb? Or should I be doing fps and ops in addition.
For solo play, it won't be the best. Like I mentioned, there is a difficulty spike as they seemed to have taken into consideration that lot of players at 50 had spent months grinding up better gear. If your playing with someone else though coop with companions it would be no problem.
What is best to do if you got enough classic coms saved up, is get some of the classic gear which is some of the best lvl 50 gear in the game. You can also use planetary coms you have saved up if any to buy mods from the makeb vendor on the fleet. The mods you can buy from that vendor with planetary coms essentially is on par with the classic gear pieces. Both those will help make Makeb easier to play. You can do Makeb and such without full set of such gear no problem though, but it doesn't hurt to gear up a bit.
Illum quest gear is not going to really help, but there is daily quests there that give you classic coms you can use to buy some good lvl 50 gear.
Again recommend doing the daily areas at 50 to get some coms and maybe a lvl or two before going to makeb, plus getting to see that content. Belsavis Daily area, Illum dailies, Black Hole area, and Section X will all give you better rewards and coms that you can use. But don't worry about getting a full set.
Makeb content will outlevel you easily while you do the story line as it goes from enemies of 51-55 while you will probably at best gain 2 levels doing the storyline alone. So you will need to get some xp elsewhere first.
j/k, how can you get fast credits other than quests? 