EVE New Citizens Q&A

Considering this already attracted the attention of someone who will gladly scam then rob you?...don't take the horrible inhabitants part lightly.

Use a courier contract and let someone else move your stuff for a price if you're not confident doing it yourself. Down the road there will be friends and corpmates who you can trust to help. Never tell them what is in the thing though or that trust may get misplaced in El Segundo.

if we're talking lowsec, the easiest way to be semi-safe is to a) fly a blockade runner and b) have a second account with a scout in a rookie ship.
as for hiring other players: unless you are moving assets by the billions, i cannot imagine you being able to hire a mercenary and still make profit. if anybody offers to escort you through lowsec for a million or ten, prepare to get blown up at the first opportunity by your 'escort'.

In EVE anything is purchasable. There are mercenary types who will do just what you are asking for a price.

You just need to make contact with them and then trust them to actually do what they say they do...

You could also ask in-game friends to tag along and provide an escort to you when you do expensive runs or you can do what is my preference:

Use a ship that is designed to withstand attack. The goal when flying around in Highsec is to make a suicide gank not worth the effort and that means using a ship with a lot of effective health. That translates into a deep space runner.

If I recall correctly I have a mastadon (minmatar deep space runner) that has around 90,000 ehp. Now, does that make my ship immune to getting attacked? Nope, I still have to be aware of the situation and who is around. But it definitely lowers the chances of it happening.

For small items with high value I fly either my prowler (minmatar blockade runner) or a covert ops ship. At all times, even in highsec, I fly cloaked. I use every trick that I know of from my time in 0.0 and use them in highsec. I treat highsec as -more- dangerous than 0.0 and lowsec.

For some perspective as to how many skill points it takes to be able to fly an advanced industrial well enough - less than 4 million skill points will do it.

In the meantime - just be careful when you fly and what I mean by that is pay attention to local, pay attention to who is on the gate and learn the mechanics of suicide ganking. The basics go like this: figure out how much effective health you need to withstand a single dedicated ganker in a battlecruiser type ship. Then set up your ship to have more effective health than that. Once you pass that value move towards having a goal of having twice that amount of EHP - to survive TWO suicide gankers. Then get to three and so on and so forth.

Your first priority is to build up enough of a tank to survive being destroyed from a single volley (known as alpha damage) so that you can, at least, react to the situation. If you don't have the ability to fly a deep space runner you can still fit your industrial ship with an eye towards its tank and to escape (which may mean fitting warp core stabilizers and +agility for a faster align time but that depends on your skills and how you like to play.) So take the time to learn about suicide ganking, learn how it is done, learn the math behind it, and you'll be well on your way to surviving. Just be aware - you are never 100% safe.

The chances of encountering a group of suicide gankers is significantly less than a pair of gankers which is less than a single ganker. But, always be aware that if you are transporting enough stuff with enough value then you will be a target regardless of what ship you fly (there are groups who specialize in ganking freighters and they have over 120k ehp).

There is no user interface support for "protection", so that if they turn around and attack you the game won't do anything about it based on a "contract" or anything like that.

As it's been said, your only options are:

- use your own alts as scouts and/or protection because nobody else can be trusted
- don't announce your route or intentions
- maximize your defenses on the ship, and/or your agility and capability to warp away, forget about guns
- make sure your cargo has less value than the cost of the ships that can take you out in one shot (research the ships and this cost)
- use courier contracts to have others haul for you

Courier contracts, in particular, are actually workable. Couriers are willing to take on hundreds of millions of ISK in collateral, for payouts of 500k or even 100k (per jump). Very cheaply, actually. Pay more get it done within an hour, pay less and give it a week to complete, and it will probably get done overnight. Esp. if you're going from / to a tradehub.

It is certainly possible to have folks escort you into low sec. The real problem is that if you hit a low sec camp the numbers of pirates hanging on gate might be a lot more than the number of escorts you bring. It is unlikely that you are going to be able to find a large number of people wanting to do escort duty on a regular basis. Or be able to afford to pay for it.

A cloaky hauler is your best bet for running gate camps in low sec. A crane or the equivelant can cloak up and warp off before getting tackled most of the time and you will take few losses if you fly it well.

I don't know if it would be useful but it may be possible to find other traders and form a mutual protection agreement. Have them flying fighters to protect your cargo and you fly a fighter to protect their cargo back.

Don't fly a lot of valuable cargo in one trip. That right there is going to protect your investment more than about anything. Make yourself not an appealing target.

You live in the Forge, if many of your trips through lowsec are within the State's borders or nearby I would suggest finding a State loyalist RP corp and seeing if they would be willing to take the contract. Create some content out of it. If you need help finding one, feel free to mail me.