EVE New Citizens Q&A

If you haven't already, I would seriously consider moving out to nullsec and learning how to move around out there. You will want to set up tacticals and safes in each system in the constellation you are going to be cycling through. You will want to learn how to move through systems that have gate camps up and how to dock at bubbled stations.

I would probably recommend doing it in a ship made for exploration, like the cheetah. You get the Survey bonus as well as bonuses to the Data and relic analyzers, plus a CovOps cloak. That will at least keep you safe while you are scanning down sites. If you move around smart-like in nullsec, about the only time you will really be in danger is when you actually uncloak and start the site hack. Ultimately, you probably want to get a friend to handle D-scan and generally keep a look out while you are hacking the systems. Someone that can keep an eye on local spikes and let you know if you need to GTFO if something shows up on grid.

Ship fits are up to you, but I would probably have an afterburner, warp stabilizer, CovOps cloak and tank mods on it. Your job will be to loot and scoot, not engage.

A Loki at this point wont work for you as you do not have the skills to pilot it efficiently. You can however train towards a nice covop ship that will do the job for you. Good thing is the covops will require the support skills that you will later use on your Tech3 Loki once you are ready. A fully fitted Loki will cost you upwards of a billion ISK. This is not a ship you use to train your craft in, every mistake you make will cost you a ship and at that price you will be digging into your savings account very fast.

For your purpose, any scanning ship will do though, a tech 2 one will even do a better job most of the time since it is highly specialized. The reason people eventually go for tech3 is because they are good allrounders, jack of all trades to say. They are less specialized then tech 2 and don't do specific jobs as well but they can do any job pretty well.

Example: a dedicated tech2 ship will scan down and hack sites faster and cloak then tech 3 but if someone shows up you need to cloak up and hide. A tech3 would be a bit slower but would have some pew pew equiped, meaning if someone shows up the tech 3 pilot would have the option to blow him out of the skies.

So in my opinion, the sensible thing to do is to make your short term goal the data sites in a cloaky scanning ship. Long term train towards Tech3, do NOT neglect your support skills, they are all on tech3, and no tech3 is an easy fit cause you have a ton of modules to fit on there.
I must tell you however, that since Odessey the exploration market has kinda collapsed due to over fishing (exploration loot sells for a lot less then it used to so a lot of guides are probably out of date at this point). Keep this in mind and keep an eye on the market for future progression/regression.

Hope this helped, Have fun o/

Many thanks for excellent suggestions!

Heeding said advice, I'll look to a cheaper scanning frig that can cloak for a starter platform.

Already with a corp based primarily in null and have become familiar with the fundamentals of moving in null/low without getting ganked...most of the time! And I have become a compulsive d-scan spammer