EVE New Citizens Q&A

The Imicus's primary weapons will be light drones, which can work pretty well on frigates - so long as you're careful and recall them if they draw enemy fire. Basic drone skills should be achievable in a few days, and they'll be useful to you throughout just about any career you pursue.

(Oh, and for boosting shielding, a Capacitor Power Relay is a bad choice - it improves capacitor recharge, but robs shield boosters' recharge strength to do it. Actually, one of the better ways to handle hostile NPC frigates might be raw speed, using a micro-warp drive or an afterburner, to fly at right angles to the NPCs and basically dodge their shots and reduce their missile fire to glancing blows.)

If you keep some range from those npc they won't hurt you much if at all, so just burn away from them while using your drones. It's not so much a ship or fit issue as you needing to get used to combat a little bit. And yes you can do it as a 2 day old character just fine if you learn a few things, Thing is that people tend to learn from mistakes so now that you got blown up you learned you need to change your strategy in regards to those npc but trust me, they're silly easy once you get the hang of it. Dying in a high sec radar site is uhm.... embarassing :P

Train up the capacitor skills to lvl 2 or so, it doesn't have to be much but a few percent better tanking here, a few percent better cap there and so forth makes all the difference.

It should only take you a couple days to train for highsec radar sites. Here's what I suggest: find an Academy and buy a bunch of cheap skills. To do this, look up one skill, for instance trajectory analysis and look at the market details. You should see sell orders that seem to be at a fixed price and amount (20,000 isk and 555 orders or something like that) go to that location (make sure it actually is a school--should say "Gellente Navy Academy" or "Center for advanced studies" or something like that) and go through the ENTIRE list of skills. Buy one of each of everything you can. There should be dozens of gunnery, engineering, mechanic, drone, navigation, electronics--everything in fact. There are dozens of skills with low training multipliers that you can train in a matter of minutes to give you marked improvement in your ships capabilities.

When you buy your skills, there should be about 30 that you can and should use right away, put them all in your skill queue and start training them right away. If you haven't done this yet it should be your top priority. This should cost you less than 1 mil to afford most of the highest priority skills.

How you fly your ship is important as well. Previous responses outlined how to fly frigates. Never stop moving, and if you're not cap stable than you have to manage your cap--pulse certain modules. An afterburner keeps your velocity up without increasing the size of your signature radius which means you will see significant increases in your transversal and angular velocity which allow you to speed tank. I suggest reading up on transversal and angular. Keeping these on your overview at all times and understanding them will give you an edge against NPCs and players alike.

Be aware that you can kite as well. Rats typically have poor range. So if you're ever in a situation where you think you can't tank the rats but you can outrange them, than by all means, kite them and they won't be able to touch you. (Certain cheap skills will help with your range--read them and find what you need)

Lastly, one responder mentioned the importance of information and knowledge in this game. I can't stress this enough. 35% of eve is the meta game. In other words, there are hundreds of websites, tools, wikis, etc that can give you an edge. Find these and take advantage of them. One that you should have right off the bat is EFT, so you can experiment with ship fitting. Another you might want to consider is EveMon which allows you to make a comprehensive skill plan.

Edit: I wanted to mention, as an explorer myself, I must advise against switching ships UNLESS if you're doing DED sites. Radar/mags can be done in an all-in-one explorer

I think that's a weak fit, likely one that's out of date given changes to retribution. And, it's not a Probe. Key changes I'd make:

Tank: This Imicus is set up to armor tank without any resistance mods, which is terrible against Angels due to their high explosive damage and the low explosive resistance of T1 armor. Switching to the Probe, it looks like Cap is a bit tight, so I'd look at the following options:

* Active Shield: Use a Small Ancillary Shield Booster and Cap Boosters to conserve cap.
* Passive/Buffer Shield: Fit a Small Shield Extender and an Explosive Deflection Amplifier, and follow up with a DCU and Shield Power Relays in the lows. Primarily, you're looking for enough tank to burn down rats on warp-in.
* Armor tank: To me, it looks really hard to fit a good armor tank on a Probe for Angels due to limited powergrid and cap. But I'd start with at least one explosive resistance mod, fortify with a second or DCU, and then rig for increased power grid and capacitor recharge to support an armor repair module.

DPS: The bad news is that the Probe is a split-weapons hull. The good news is that you have your choice of missiles or turrets as your secondary weapon. Personally, I'd go for light missiles for a little bit of extra range and easier fit compared to artillery, and snipe from ~15km out. Drone skills will be very helpful, because once you train into Tech II drones and some of the secondary skills, you can pop most highsec radar rats in seconds.

Rigs: If you're having trouble with DPS or tank, I'd rig for DPS or tank over scan bonuses. If you're running an armor repairer you'll probably need to rig for cap and powergrid.

Tactics: Usually when I find multiple rats on a radar site, they're spread out and it's possible to pull one set without drawing aggression on the other. Almost always in highsec, you'll have the advantage in both damage projection and speed. Pop them at range or kite them.

They extended the drone bay on the Imcus... Its now a 25m3 drone bay.