EVE New Citizens Q&A

First, get EFT (Eve Fitting Tool) so that you can play with ship fittings without having to actually buy the ship or modules, and answer "is this fitting good" questions yourself.

Caracal is a missile ship, and Heavy Missiles are the long range type of cruiser-sized missiles. So, for a long-range fitting, it's good that you've fitted the afterburner to maintain your range.

For defenses, you're trying to do a passive shield tank, where you enhance shield regeneration and resists to useful levels. However, you're not doing it right; you've chosen an active shield resistance module (invuln field), which forces you to waste slots for cap recharge. A passive shield tank setup will use your mid slots AND low slots for the tank, like this:

Mid Slots:
Large Shield Extender
2x Shield Resistance Amplifiers (Thermic Dissipation Amplifier, Kinetic Deflection Amplifier) - passive (no cap required)
Shield Recharger

Low Slots:
2x Shield Power Relay

The way you have it fitted, your Invuln Field requires capacitor, forcing the use of the Capacitor Power Relay which completely negates the effect of your M51 Shield Recharger. In addition, the Invuln is an omni-resist, and it uses a lot more capacitor juice than the single-resist hardeners, and you don't need omni-resist for missions, you just need 2 resistances. For each mission you can look up what enemies you'll face and tailor your resistance to them; for Guristas it's typically thermal and kinetic, but you can just swap out what you need before undocking for the mission.

Passive shield tanking requires skills; you need to train Shield Compensation skills for each resist type in order to get good performance out of the Resistance Amplifiers. So, if you don't have skills trained, it's better to use an active shield tank, because shield hardeners (like the invuln field) give you a straight 50% resist (or 25% or whatever), regardless of skill. So, active shield tank:

Mid Slots:
Medium Ancillary Shield Booster (uses cap charges, then uses up your capacitor when it runs out of charges)
2x Shield Hardeners (Kinetic Deflection Field, Thermic Dissipation Field)

Low Slots:
Damage Control

So a lot fewer slots are used, which would allow you to install some Ballistic Control System modules in your low slots to increase your missile damage by quite a lot. But, you may have a capacitor issue, so you may need Cap Recharger medium slot modules and Medium Capacitor Control Circuit rigs to offset.

Considering what enemies you'll face, for Level 2 (cruiser) missions, it's mostly frigates and a few cruiser bosses, and the NPCs typically try to just get to close range and orbit you. Your heavy long range missiles will have trouble doing full damage to small fast frigates, so Target Painter and Stasis Webifier modules in the mid slots are rather critical until you can train the missile skills (Target Navigation Prediction, Warhead Upgrades etc.) to enable heavy missiles to hit small targets better. The target painter is medium range, but the webifier is short range, so fit a Target Painter and use your 2 light drones as extra protection against frigates that are too fast to hit.

So active tank with Target Painter and Ballistics for extra DPS:

Mid Slots:
10mn Afterburner
Medium Ancillary Shield Booster
Kinetic Deflection Field
Thermic Dissipation Field
Target Painter

Low Slots:
Damage Control
Ballistic Control System x3

Rigs:
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit x3

And for damage, use the Heavy Missiles, or you can consider going short range with Heavy Assault Missiles, or tailor the missiles to the frigate targets you'll mostly face, and use Rapid Light Missile Launchers instead of Heavies. You can swap these in/out before each mission, too, but don't mix weapon systems; you always want to min-max your setup for a situation (long or short range) by using the (same) appropriate weapon in all high slots, and then force that situation to happen (control range with afterburner, control targets with target painter / webifier).

The afterburner allows you to get into close range or try to stay at long range, so try the different missiles out and see what works best for you.

Slightly off topic here; but I've always understood the difference between a passive and active shield tank to be that a passive shield tank uses the shield recharge rate to replenish tank, while an active tank would be using a shield booster of some description to do the same.

Hardeners, active or not, are typically used in both.

I just want to mention to the OP to not forget the PDU. The Power Diagnostic unit ( or I guess now it's called the power diagnostic system ) It's not ideal to use a PDU as a tank mod but early on when you have fitting issues and / or low skills it can help to make a tank work.

The PDU increases:
Shield recharge rate
capacitor recharge rate
power grid
shield HP
capacitor amount

So in some cases it will allow you to use hardners instead of resistance amps which can make a tank workable.

Of course over the years I've found that the best defense is a good offense as you don't have to tank incoming dps from dead NPCs but regardless it's something to think about.

Again I would not recommend it for the long haul but it can help you in the short term to get over a hump.

LOL, it's exactly the other way around. RLML do good damage (they have a fast rate of fire) but reload rather slowly.

I in-game messaged the OP so this is more for any other new players but using all your slots is way more important than exactly which meta of mod that you use.

So ship fits in Eve all the mods rely on each other. For example capacitor regen is figured as total capacitor amount multiplied by your regen amount. Any module which increase total capacitor amount or your regen rate both increase how much cap per second that you regen while at max regen ( somewhere between 25-35% capacitor ). On the other side of that any module which uses capacitor chews away at that capacitor amount that you are regenerating.

The simplified version of this is that having a good overall plan on your fit and using all the available slots will help way more than having all faction mods versus all meta zero mods for example. This is a big part of why the fitting skills are so important as having to use "fitting mods" really hurts your fit.

Anyway I gave the OP some isk to buy the CCC rigs so just get them and try them out.

Are you splitting missile types across launchers? Don't do that

All mission NPC ships have a resist profile, they same way your ship does.
NPC Damage types and resists

Look at the NPC you'll be fighting, and fit the missiles that will cause damage to the resist 'hole'.

It will make your ammo logistics a lot easier and allows you to group your launchers to avoid micro-management.