EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi there, intrepid new lowsec hauler!

You obviously did your research and you also seem to have a healthy level of paranoia.

Verdict: you'll be fine!


Longer answer:

. BR + covops cloak is already 99% safe; fitting for align time is a further excellent safety boost

. you need to be VERY unlucky to land <2km from something. however, **** happens. you could fit 1 or 2 warp stabs as extra protection

. if you fly in immediately after downtime, you have a good chance of getting through alive even in a freighter! seriously, it's extremely improbable, borderline impossible, that you'll find a gate camp immediately after dt. you could easily find one just before dt though (merry pirates 'finishing off the night'), so be careful

. you COULD fit also a MWD to either 1) burn away from anything that's decloaking you or 2) try to burn back to gate, but a decent gatecamp will get you every time if you try this. some people also use an MWD to make it harder for 'ceptors to try to decloak you (hit warp + covops cloak + mwd) but I don't find it necessary in lowsec. quick align time (3 or 4 seconds max, with a covops cloak) is enough imo

Beware of gates very close together. Some don't provide enough time for recloak or capacitor, so watch that.

If you warp to a gate and are < 2km when you land, that's ideal to jump.

When you go through the gate, you always spawn 12 km from it.

If you warp to a gate and are > 2km when you land, you coast for a second or two while cloaked and jump.
This is fairly uncommon, but does happen.

It is far more common to press the cloak button after breaking gate-cloak, and either nothing happens, or you are told it cannot be engaged yet. One has to expect to double-tap the cloak button, but not get into the habit of actually doing that unless needed.

I landed in the middle of a huge two fleet gate war. Nobody paid me any attention and I warped away.

I only fear jumping through a gate to nulsec, and discovering the nulsec side is bubbled. Happens, but is not as common as one might expect, because it is so annoying that fleets destroy those sort of bubbles. Drag and stop bubbles around a gate are far more common, as they are more easily avoided. Otherwise overload the MWD, activated MWD and cloak at same time, and coast out of bubble.

Uncommon in my experience.

In general gate camps are very rare.

I've gone some 46+ jumps through lowsec and nulsec in a rookie ship without a cloak or prop mod.

Yes, I realize I left out the phrase '... from any object that decloaks me.' That's exactly what the 2km was a reference to, and you did an amazing job of seeing through my typo to the point I was asking about. Thanks!

Checking in as someone who often uses a Blockade Runner in low-sec.

- gate camps are usually on the most often traveled routes. Find the "back ways" and you will almost never run into a gate camp.

- start with fitting your BR (Blockade Runner) for align time, survivability, and warp core stabs. Get a feel for things. Eventually you will feel comfortable enough to fit lots of cargohold expanders.

- it is rare that you will land far enough from a gate that you decloak but can't jump through. For this reason, always fit a MWD (MircowarpDrive).

- the trickiest part about using a BR is activating the cloak at just the right time. This takes practice and knowledge of how the server functions (hint: the server runs at a rate of 1 Hz... which means it accepts, processes, and sends out the result of the last action you gave your ship to do once per second).
Generally speaking... don't try activating your cloak until right after you hear the "Warp Drive Activated" audio. And DO NOT spam the cloaking command. "Bad things" will happen when you do that.

My alt's BR is fit for max cargo and I've only ever lost 3. One was to a resebo'd insta loki and the others to dictor pilots that were good at what they did. You will be fine.

For what it is worth, every single Blockade Runner my alts and I have ever killed was fitted for maximum cargo space (even though almost all of them were empty). Refitting for agility and faster acceleration would definitely have helped them.

if you are going to be in the same area most of the time you can always create tactical bookmarks that are greater than 150km from the gate (and usually out of alignment with celestial bodies), you you can warp to them instead of the gate, then warp down to the gate. Should protect you from smartbombs.

also depending on the camp and which BR you are flying if you run into space junk that won't let you cloak it might be best to MWD back to the gate. nano prowler hits 4km/s with a heated MWD. the others look to be more in the 3k area. Other times MWD out into space and hope you can cloak in the next server tick.

And I will double down on the make sure you have station insta dock and undock bookmarks. landing off a station with a bunch of hostiles on grid isn't a fun second or two.