Missions & Complexes

where are you exploring, what kinds of exploring do you want to do, what ship will you be using. Unless you want to drop billions on a virtue set, everything else depends on the answers to the first three questions.

If you want to do wormhole exploring best implants are no implants. This way from start you wont be afraid to death jump or risk clone. Later you might want ot have standart pve clone.

With lvl4 skills in cov ops you can scan down pretty much anything long one or two steps before smallest probe range. So any plants for it is just a waste.

Having general purpose ship s usually bad idea too. Try having dedicated prober and fighter.

Your jackpot -- if you opt to stay with Serpentis and Guristas low sec -- is an a-type invuln, which goes for ~1.5 bil these days.

Anyhow, have you ever scanned before? Try that out. See if your skills are high enough to do it effectively on an unbonused ship.

If so, hop in an Ishtar. No, not a Vexor, not a Navy Vexor. Gila is an option, but you'd want an Ishtar ultimately. And just start combing for sites from there. Buy a few; you'll lose them. In fact, as you learn the ropes you'll likely lose one or two to NPCs and a handful to players (this assuming you don't know low sec very well).

Edit: oh, and if your scanning skills aren't up to the job, go for either a T3 (Tengu is probably your best bet in this case, but a Proteus could work) or a two ship option.

Second edit: Ishtar/Gila/NVexor won't really work that well in hacking sites either. That would be a pure combat setup with some probing. T3s and two ship options allow for both combats and professional sites.

Not 4/10s, but if you're in low sec why would you worry too much about those? That's high sec fodder.

You can scan around in unbonused hulls, but to get all sites pinned (in lowsec for instance the hardest sigs are only proficiency sites - would be 10/10 in nullsec) you will need very good scanning skills (lv5 rangefinding) and you will also need to invest in the +5 equivalent scanning strength implant. Well and sisters gear. Maybe with the new modules you can get it done easier, if you can make room to fit one. To make all this information more clear aim for a probe strength of 80 to do this (but you need to fiddle around by moving probes very close to each other to get 100% on hardest sigs).

As for relic/datas - for me in lowsec they just don't cut it atm. Prices have gone downhill so much, they are hardly worth it. And finding a tower BPC (if you want to make that your goal) would probably make you ragequit.

I would also like to point out that, if you dont have much experience outside highsec, you might want to maybe take a scanning frig out to lowsec first and do some data/relics (and maybe get ganked by a bomber), to get the hang of it.